Skip to main content

Full text of "Fighting for a living : [electronic resource] comparative history of military labour 1500-2000"

See other formats


WORKAROUND 

THE  GLOBE,  VOL.  I 

^  Vvi 

H 

;  ■  V  \^  ■ 

\  ly  #r'  "               *  s 

Fighting  for  a  Living 

A  Comparative  History  of 
Military  Labour  1500-2000 

Edited  by 
ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 

•    AMSTERDAM  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 


Fighting  for  a  Living 


Work  Around  the  Globe:  Historical 
Comparisons  and  Connections 

Open  Access  Book  Series  of  the  International  Institute  of 
Social  History  (IISH) 

Most  human  beings  work,  and  growing  numbers  are  exposed  to  labour  markets. 
These  markets  are  increasingly  globally  competitive  and  cause  both  capital  and 
labour  to  move  around  the  world.  In  search  of  the  cheapest  labour,  industries 
and  service-based  enterprises  move  from  West  to  East  and  South,  but  also,  for 
example,  westwards  from  China's  east  coast.  People  move  from  areas  with  few 
employment  opportunities  to  urban  and  industrial  hubs,  both  between  and 
within  continents.  However,  labour  relations  have  been  shifting  already  for 
centuries,  labour  migrations  go  back  far  in  time,  and  changing  labour  relations 
cannot  be  comprehended  without  history.  Therefore,  understanding  these 
developments  and  their  consequences  in  the  world  of  work  and  labour  relations 
requires  sound  historical  research,  based  on  the  experiences  of  different  groups  of 
workers  in  different  parts  of  the  world  at  different  moments  in  time,  throughout 
human  history. 

The  research  and  publications  department  of  the  International  Institute  of  Social 
History  (IISH)  has  taken  on  a  leading  role  in  research  and  publishing  on  the 
global  history  of  labour  relations.  In  the  context  of  Global  Labour  History,  three 
central  research  questions  have  been  defined:  (1)  What  labour  relations  have 
emerged  in  parallel  with  the  rise  and  advance  of  market  economies?  (2)  How 
can  their  incidence  (and  consequently  the  transition  from  one  labour  relation  to 
another)  be  explained,  and  are  these  worldwide  transitions  interlinked?  (3)  What 
are  the  social,  economic,  political,  and  cultural  consequences  of  their  changing 
incidence,  and  how  do  they  relate  to  forms  of  individual  and  collective  agency 
among  workers?  These  three  questions  are  interconnected  in  time,  but  also  in 
space.  Recent  comparative  Global  Labour  History  research  demonstrates  that 
shifts  in  one  part  of  the  globe  have  always  been  linked  to  shifts  in  other  parts. 

Series  editor:  Jan  Lucassen,  International  Institute  of  Social  History,  Amsterdam 
Editorial  Board:  Ulbe  Bosma,  Karin  Hofmeester,  Gijs  Kessler,  International 
Institute  of  Social  History,  Amsterdam 

Executive  editor:  Aad  Blok,  International  Institute  of  Social  History,  Amsterdam 


Fighting  for  a  Living 

A  Comparative  History  of  Military  Labour 
1500-2000 


Edited  by 
Erik-Jan  Zurcher 


Amsterdam  University  Press 


Cover  illustration:  'A  Turkish  Janissary',  c.  1480,  Gentile  Bellini  (Venetian,  c.  1429-1507) 
©  The  British  Museum  Company  Limited 

Cover  design:  Studio  Jan  de  Boer,  Amsterdam 
Layout:  Crius  Group,  Hulshout 

Amsterdam  University  Press  English-language  titles  are  distributed  in  the  US  and  Canada  by 
the  University  of  Chicago  Press. 

ISBN  9789089644527 
e-ISBN      97890  485i725i(pdf) 
e-ISBN      978  90  4851 726  8  (ePub) 
NUR         685  /  696 

Creative  Commons  License  CC  BY  NC  ND 
(http://creativecommons.0rg/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.o) 

©  Erik-Jan  Ziircher  /  Amsterdam  University  Press,  Amsterdam  2013 

Some  rights  reserved.  Without  limiting  the  rights  under  copyright  reserved  above,  any  part  of 
this  book  may  be  reproduced,  stored  in  or  introduced  into  a  retrieval  system,  or  transmitted, 
in  any  form  or  by  any  means  (electronic,  mechanical,  photocopying,  recording  or  otherwise). 


In  memory  of  Gilles  Veinstein  (1945-2013) 


Contents 


Preface  9 

Introduction  11 
Understanding  changes  in  military  recruitment  and  employment 
worldwide 

Erik-Jan  Ziircher 

Military  labor  in  China,  c.  1500  43 
David  M.  Robinson 

From  the  mamluks  to  the  mansabdars  81 
A  social  history  of  military  service  in  South  Asia,  c.  1500  to  c.  1650 
Kaushik  Roy 

On  the  Ottoman  janissaries  (fourteenth-nineteenth  centuries)  115 
Gilles  Veinstein 

Soldiers  in  Western  Europe,  c.  1500-1790  135 
Frank  Tallett 

The  Scottish  mercenary  as  a  migrant  labourer  in  Europe,  1550-1650  169 
James  Miller 

Change  and  continuity  in  mercenary  armies:  Central  Europe,  1650-1750  201 
Michael  Sikora 

Peasants  fighting  for  a  living  in  early  modern  North  India  243 
DirkKA.Kolff 

"True  to  their  salt"  267 
Mechanisms  for  recruiting  and  managing  military  labour  in  the 
army  of  the  East  India  Company  during  the  Carnatic  Wars  in  India 
Robert Johnson 


"The  scum  of  every  county,  the  refuse  of  mankind" 
Recruiting  the  British  Army  in  the  eighteenth  century 
Peter  Way 


291 


Mobilization  of  warrior  populations  in  the  Ottoman  context, 
1750-1850 

Virginia  H.  Aksan 


33i 


Military  employment  in  Qing  dynasty  China  353 
Christine  Moll-Murata  and  Ulrica  Theobald 

Military  service  and  the  Russian  social  order,  1649-1861  393 

Elise  Kimerling  Wirtschafter 

The  French  army,  1789-1914  419 
Volunteers,  pressed  soldiers,  and  conscripts 
Thomas  Hippler 

The  Dutch  army  in  transition  447 
From  all-volunteer  force  to  cadre-militia  army,  1795-1830 
Herman  Amersfoort 

The  draft  and  draftees  in  Italy,  1861-1914  479 

Marco  Rovinello 

Nation-building,  war  experiences,  and  European  models  519 
The  rejection  of  conscription  in  Britain 
Jorn  Leonhard 

Mobilizing  military  labor  in  the  age  of  total  war  547 
Ottoman  conscription  before  and  during  the  Great  War 
MehmetBesikci 

Soldiering  as  work  581 
The  all-volunteer  force  in  the  United  States 
Beth  Bailey 

Private  contractors  in  war  from  the  1990s  to  the  present  613 

A  review  essay 
S.  Yelda  Kay  a 

Collective  bibliography  639 


Notes  on  contributors 


687 


Preface 


He's  five-foot-two,  and  he's  six-feet-four, 
He  fights  with  missiles  and  with  spears. 
He's  all  of  thirty-one,  and  he's  only  seventeen, 
He's  been  a  soldier  for  a  thousand  years. 

He's  the  one  who  gives  his  body 

As  a  weapon  of  the  war, 

And  without  him  all  this  killing  can't  go  on. 

-  Buffy  Sainte-Marie,  "Universal  Soldier"  (1964) 

This  pioneering  volume  is  a  remarkable  international  attempt  to  bridge 
the  gap  between  military  history  and  labour  history,  by  exploring  the 
labour  of  the  military  as  a  subject  in  its  own  right.  During  2009-2012,  a 
team  of  twenty  researchers  from  nine  countries  led  by  Erik-Jan  Ziircher 
systematically  reconstructed  the  similarities  and  differences  between 
military  recruitment  and  employment  systems  in  Asia  and  Europe  from 
the  sixteenth  century  onwards.  Their  comparative  approach  has  made 
it  possible  to  discover  general  historical  patterns.  In  turn,  these  patterns 
suggest  causal  relationships  which  could,  should,  and  no  doubt  will  be  the 
subject  of  more  in-depth  studies  in  the  future. 

Until  now,  military  historians  and  labour  historians  inhabited  separate 
worlds.  Military  historians  were  concerned  with  wars,  military  doctrines, 
arms  technology,  campaign  logistics,  and  similar  issues.  For  them,  soldiers 
usually  enter  into  the  picture  as  the  executors  of  commands,  and,  in  the 
narrative  of  military  historians,  what  decides  the  outcome  of  battles  are  the 
numbers,  skills,  weaponry  and  morale  of  the  combatants.  Labour  historians 
by  contrast  regard  soldiers  above  all  as  the  oppressors  of  labour  resistance, 
who  sometimes  -  in  revolutionary  situations  -  change  sides  and  join  the 
workers.  According  to  many  labour  historians,  what  soldiers  do  as  soldiers  is 
not  "work"  -  since  work  is  constructive,  not  destructive  -  but  instead  a  kind 
of  "anti-work".  The  military  are  indeed  conventionally  excluded  from  "the 
labour  force",  and  therefore  they  are  not  counted  in  labour  force  statistics. 

The  idea  that  what  soldiers  do  "cannot  be  work"  is  a  moralistic  prejudice, 
however.  Work  is  the  purposeful  production  of  useful  objects  or  services. 
Thus,  work  is  a  purposive  activity,  and  work  creates  objects  or  services  that 
are  useful  to  the  people  for  whom  the  work  is  done.  That  makes  participation 


10 


in  military  activities  just  as  much  a  labour  process  as  any  other,  even  if 
many  civilians  do  not  regard  it  as  a  "useful  activity"  and  have  no  use  for  it. 

Soldiers'  work  can  involve  all  kinds  of  different  jobs.  Of  course,  the 
subjugation  and  killing  of  people  and  the  destruction  of  enemy  positions 
are  "core  tasks",  but  the  military  can  also  perform  guard  duties,  dig  ditches, 
look  after  the  transport  of  goods  and  messages,  and  construct  buildings, 
roads,  canals,  and  dams.  What  most  soldiers  do  in  army  life  obviously  differs 
from  what  labourers  do  in  a  factory,  or  nurses  in  a  hospital.  Yet,  in  real  life, 
soldiers  are  workers  just  as  much  as  labourers  and  nurses  are.  Significantly, 
the  English  word  "mercenary"  is  derived  from  the  Latin  mercenarius,  which 
literally  meant  no  more  than  "a  hireling",  that  is,  someone  who  is  paid  for 
his  work  (in  Latin,  merx  =  commodity). 

In  their  team  effort,  the  authors  of  this  volume  have  made  a  great 
contribution  to  a  new  kind  of  historiography,  one  that  integrates  differ- 
ent subdisciplines,  and  incorporates  local  findings  in  a  globally  oriented 
approach.  The  readers  of  this  book  have  in  their  hands  a  path-breaking 
collection  of  essays  which,  I  am  sure,  will  inspire  historical  research  about 
military  labour  for  many  years  to  come. 

Marcel  van  der  Linden 
Amsterdam,  March  2013 


Introduction 


Understanding  changes  in  military  recruitment  and 
employment  worldwide 

Erik-Jan  Zurcher 

For  a  long  time,  labour  historians  have  not  regarded  the  activities  of  soldiers 
as  work.  Work  was  defined  as  an  activity  yielding  surplus  value  and  the 
efforts  of  soldiers  were  seen  as  being  essentially  destructive  rather  than 
productive.  This  assumption  that  military  work  is  necessarily  destructive 
and  does  not  produce  surplus  value  is  debatable  for  at  least  two  reasons. 
The  first  is  that  soldiers  everywhere  spend  far  more  time  in  barracks  than 
on  campaign  and,  while  they  are  garrisoned,  they  have  very  often  been 
employed  as  cheap  labour  in  agriculture  or  in  building  works  and  road 
repair.  Many  of  the  greatest  infrastructural  works  in  countries  as  far  apart 
as  France  and  China  -  city  walls,  dikes,  canals  -  would  never  have  been 
realized  except  for  the  massive  use  of  military  manpower.  Soldiers  have 
frequently  been  employed  in  the  wake  of  natural  disasters,  in  which  case 
their  labour  should  be  regarded  as  similar  to  that  of  nurses  and  ambulance 
drivers.  The  second,  more  profound  reason  is  that,  as  Peter  Way  has  argued, 
the  end  result  of  warfare,  if  successful,  is  that  surplus  value  for  states  and 
their  elites  is  created  through  territorial  gain  or  economic  advantage.1 

Whatever  the  merits  of  the  argument,  the  result  of  the  view  that  what 
a  soldier  does  is  not  work  has  been  that  military  labour  has  not  become 
the  object  of  research  in  the  same  way  as  the  labour  of,  for  instance,  dock- 
workers,  textile  workers,  miners,  or  agricultural  workers.2  One  of  the  very 
first  people  to  resist  this  approach  was  Jan  Lucassen  of  the  International 
Institute  of  Social  History  (IISH).  As  early  as  1994,  he  considered  the  "pro- 
letarian experience"  of  mercenaries  in  early  modern  Europe.3  That  was  a 
pioneering  effort,  because  it  is  only  very  recently  that  the  topic  of  military 
labour  has  begun  to  receive  attention  from  social  historians.  In  2003,  Bruce 

1  Following  Marx,  Peter  Way  closely  identifies  the  growth  of  capitalism  and  the  modern  state 
with  warfare,  particularly,  colonial  warfare.  See  Way,  "Klassenkrieg". 

2  Chris  Tilly  and  Charles  Tilly  express  this  point  of  view  in  their  book  Work  Under  Capitalism, 
p.  23:  "To  be  sure,  not  all  efforts  qualify  as  work;  purely  destructive,  expressive,  or  consumptive 
acts  lie  outside  the  bound;  in  so  far  as  they  reduce  transferable  use  value,  we  might  think  of 
them  as  antiwork." 

3  Lucassen,  "The  Other  Proletarians",  p.  185. 


12 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


Scates  published  "The  Price  of  War:  Labour  Historians  Confront  Military 
History",  in  the  Australian  journal  Labour  History,  and  this  journal  has 
since  continued  to  show  an  interest  in  the  subject  with  the  publications 
of  Nathan  Wise.4  However,  the  scope  of  the  Australian  publications  had 
been  limited  in  time  and  space  (mainly  the  Australian  volunteer  army 
of  the  First  World  War).  In  2006,  German  historical  anthropologist  Alf 
Liidtke  published  a  text  with  a  broader  comparative  scope  -  "War  as  Work: 
Aspects  of  Soldiering  in  20th  Century  War"  -  which  was,  however,  as  the 
title  implies,  limited  to  the  recent  past.  In  2011,  the  journal  International 
Labor  and  Working-Class  History  devoted  a  special  feature  to  "Labor  and 
the  Military",  which  contained  six  very  interesting  articles  on  the  subject. 
The  approach,  however,  is  different  from  ours  in  that  the  military  (or  the 
army)  and  labour,  both  in  the  sense  of  work  and  in  that  of  the  workforce, 
are  seen  as  two  separate  elements  in  the  equation,  the  relation  between 
which  is  studied,  whereas  in  the  context  of  Fighting  for  a  Living  questions 
are  asked  about  military  service  itself  as  a  form  of  labour.5  In  our  view, 
soldiers  are  not  a  separate  category  of  people  who  sometimes  fulfil  the  role 
of  workers;  they  are  workers. 

Another  recent  initiative  that  indicates  a  growing  interest  in  the  subject 
was  a  conference  at  Duke  University  in  April  2011  entitled  "Beyond  the  Bat- 
tlefield: The  Labor  of  Military  Service  in  Latin  America  and  the  Caribbean", 
which  treats  some  of  the  same  issues  in  a  regional  context.  But  once  more, 
the  papers  at  this  conference  largely  concentrated  on  the  non-military,  or  at 
least  non-martial,  roles  played  by  soldiers  in  the  societies  and  economies  of 
the  region  and  thus  seemed  to  understand  labour  as  something  essentially 
outside  the  core  business  of  soldiering. 

I  became  more  and  more  aware  of  the  degree  to  which  a  soldier's  life  itself 
can  be  understood  in  terms  of  labour  when  I  did  empirical  research  in  the 
1990s  on  the  everyday  realities  of  Ottoman  soldiers'  lives  during  the  First 
World  War.6  The  paths  of  Jan  Lucassen  and  myself  converged  and  in  1999  we 
published  "Conscription  as  Military  Labour:  The  Historical  Context".  Over 
the  years,  my  specialist  interest  in  the  history  of  conscription  in  the  Middle 
East  convinced  me  that  there  was  a  need  to  pursue  more  wide-ranging 

4  Wise,  "The  Lost  Labour  Force",  '"In  Military  Parlance,  I  Suppose  We  Were  Mutineers'". 

5  One  article  that  does  strike  at  the  heart  of  the  discussions  in  Fighting  for  a  Living  is  the 
contribution  by  Jennifer  Mittelstadt,  "The  Army  Is  a  Service,  Not  a  Job",  in  the  special  feature 
edited  by  Joshua  B.  Freeman  and  Geoffrey  Field. 

6  Ziircher,  "Between  Death  and  Desertion",  "The  Ottoman  Conscription  System  in  Theory 
and  Practice",  "Ottoman  Labour  Battalions  in  World  War  I",  "Hizmet  Etmeyi  Baska  Bicjmlerle 
Reddetmek". 


INTRODUCTION 


13 


research  into  the  circumstances  which  have  produced  starkly  different 
systems  of  recruiting  and  employing  soldiers  in  different  parts  of  the  globe, 
as  well  as  to  analyse  the  social  and  political  implications  that  the  different 
systems  have  had  in  a  number  of  states  and  societies.  When  I  moved  to 
the  IISH  in  2008,  this  idea  was  received  enthusiastically  by  the  research 
department  of  the  institute  and,  as  a  consequence,  the  project  Fighting  for  a 
Living  was  started  in  2009,  of  which  this  book  is  the  result.  It  concentrated 
on  land  armies  in  Europe,  the  Middle  East,  India,  and  China  in  the  period 
1500-2000  because  the  project  was  limited  explicitly  to  state  armies  in  the 
context  of  advanced  state  formation.  That  means  that  important  areas  and 
categories  were  not  included  -  Latin  America,  Africa  and  Australasia  -  but 
also  non-state  forces  (guerrilla  movements,  slave  or  peasant  rebel  armies). 
That  we  also  excluded  the  navy  may  beseenasa  serious  omission,  but  this 
is  because  we  recognized  that  navies,  which  in  many  respects  are  very 
different  from  land  armies  in  their  skill  levels,  in  their  traditions,  and  in 
their  recruitment,  offer  a  hugely  interesting  field  for  comparative  research 
on  military  labour  in  their  own  right.  We  have  decided  to  leave  that  topic 
to  a  possible  separate  project.7 

Of  course,  it  might  be  argued  that  "the  state"  in  a  sense  is  a  modern 
concept  and  that  to  use  it  to  categorize  pre-modern  phenomena  is  anach- 
ronistic. Doubtless,  neither  the  sixteenth-century  Landsknecht  nor  the 
nineteenth-century  Swiss  mercenary8  would  see  himself  as  fighting  for 
a  "state".  They  were  members  of  corporate  bodies  whose  identities  were 
to  a  large  extent  formed  in  the  field,  and  they  were  hired  by  kings.  Early 
twentieth-century  Ottoman  soldiers  certainly  saw  themselves  as  defending 
their  ruler  and  their  religion,  but  that  does  not  have  to  prevent  us,  as  twenty- 
first-century  historians,  from  using  the  state  as  an  analytical  category,  to 
distinguish  the  soldiers  recruited  by  monarchs  and  republics  (directly  or 
indirectly)  from  guerrilla  forces  and  rebel  movements. 

7  Such  a  project  could  build  on  the  work  done  by  maritime  and  labour  historians  in  the 
mid-1990s,  which  has  resulted  in  the  volume  of  conference  proceedings  edited  by  Van  Royen, 
Bruijn,  andLucassen,  Those  Emblems  of  Hell?  Thisbookis  not  exclusively  about  navies,  however. 
It  is  primarily  about  commercial  shipping. 

8  The  term  "mercenary"  over  time  has  acquired  very  negative  connotations,  especially  since 
the  advent  of  the  nation-state,  when  defending  the  fatherland  came  to  be  denoted  as  both  a 
duty  and  a  privilege  of  citizens.  Throughout  this  book,  however,  we  use  it  without  expressing 
any  value  judgement,  simply  to  denote  those  soldiers  who  operated  in  a  market  in  the  sense  that 
they  had  a  choice  of  employers  and  engaged  themselves  at  least  formally  on  the  basis  of  free 
will.  This  serves  to  distinguish  them  from  those  soldiers  who  were  also  paid  for  their  services 
(and  sometimes  generously),  but  who  did  not  operate  under  market  conditions  and  had  only 
one  possible  employer. 


14 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


If  we  decide  to  regard  the  work  of  the  military  as  labour,  one  legitimate 
question  to  ask  is,  of  course,  whether  military  labour  is  in  any  fundamental 
sense  different  from  other  forms  of  labour.  One  could  argue  that  one  aspect 
of  military  work  is  unique  in  that  it  explicitly  transcends  humankind's 
greatest  taboo:  killing  members  of  the  same  species.  Even  if  soldiers  spend 
far  more  time  in  barracks  or  on  the  march  than  in  actual  battles,  the  fact 
that  the  ultimate  purpose  of  an  army  is  to  fight  and  kill  makes  it  different 
-  more  so,  certainly,  than  the  fact  that  there  is  risk  involved,  as  for  most 
people  in  most  societies  exposure  to  risk  has  been  the  normal  condition,  be 
it  from  violence,  starvation,  childbirth,  or  contagious  disease.  But  whatever 
its  exceptionality,  ultimately  an  army  is  built  on  the  factors  of  capital  and 
labour  just  like  any  other  industry,  and  it  is  this  that  makes  it  possible  to 
analyse  the  activities  of  the  soldier  as  just  another  form  of  work. 

Fighting  for  a  Living  has  yielded  twenty  hugely  interesting  case  studies 
covering  four  continents  and  five  centuries  and  these  are  now  presented  in 
this  study.  The  following  is  an  attempt,  based  on  the  twenty  draft  chapters 
that  the  members  of  the  research  group  have  produced  and  the  many 
thought-provoking  discussions  we  have  had,  to  construct  a  taxonomy  of 
military  labour  relations  in  Europe  and  Asia  over  the  previous  five  hundred 
years,  to  discern  underlying  patterns  and  make  some  suggestions  about 
what  kind  of  determinants  influence  the  prevalence  or  demise  of  certain 
types  of  labour  relations  within  the  military. 

Huge  variations 

On  a  phenomenological  level,  even  when  we  limit  ourselves  to  land  armies 
in  the  service  of  the  state,  the  variety  of  forms  of  military  labour  is  almost 
endless  but,  to  make  meaningful  comparisons  possible,  a  basic  classification 
has  to  be  applied.  The  search  for  such  a  classification  was  high  on  the  agenda 
of  the  research  group  of  Fighting  for  a  Living. 

One  way  of  grouping  the  different  phenomena  is  that  employed  by  John 
Lynn  in  his  seminal  work  on  the  developments  of  European  armies.9  Lynn 
distinguishes  four  basic  "army  styles":  the  "feudal  army",  the  "aggregate  con- 
tract army",  the  "state  commission  army",  and  the  "conscript  army".  Central 
to  his  thesis  is  the  notion  that,  around  1650,  the  aggregate  contract  army, 
which  Lynn  describes  as  "a  force  cobbled  together  from  a  small  number  of 
state  troops,  the  hiring  of  mercenary  bands,  and  the  incorporation  of  private 

9     Lynn,  "The  Evolution  of  Army  Style  in  the  Modern  West". 


INTRODUCTION 


15 


armies  raised  by  major  aristocrats  and  put  at  the  ruler's  service",10  gave  way 
to  a  recognizably  different  style,  that  of  the  state  commission  army.  The 
state  commission  armies  that  came  to  dominate  in  Europe  after  1650  were 
both  more  national  in  composition  and  more  uniform,  as  well  as  much 
bigger  than  the  mercenary  armies  had  been.  States  took  upon  themselves 
more  of  the  responsibility  for  clothing,  feeding,  and  equipping  the  troops, 
something  that,  among  other  things,  led  to  the  invention  of  the  uniform 
itself.  However,  in  his  recent  work,  Lynn  has  recognized  that  in  some  coun- 
tries, such  as  the  Dutch  United  Provinces  with  their  small  population  but 
well-filled  coffers,  the  mercenary  remained  very  important  after  that  date. 
In  fact,  the  eighteenth  century  was  the  heyday  of  the  seigneurial  system, 
in  which  smaller  German  states  hired  out  their  regiments  to  richer,  more 
powerful  states  in  exchange  for  "subsidies".  As  is  well  known,  the  British 
fought  their  wars  in  North  America  partly  with  Hessian  and  Hanoverian 
regiments  acquired  in  exchange  for  subsidies. 

Although  the  dividing  line  of  1650  has  kept  its  validity,  the  exceptions 
show  that  army  styles  in  fact  rarely  occur  in  a  pure  form.  Like  Max  Weber's 
bureaucracy,  they  are  ideal  types.  In  reality,  our  research  shows  that  armies 
were  composite  bodies  with  different  army  styles  coexisting  at  the  same 
time.  Mercenaries  continued  to  play  a  role  in  the  state  commission  armies  of 
the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  even  if  they  no  longer  dominated 
and,  as  Thomas  Hippler  shows,  the  army  of  the  ancien  regime  also  included 
conscripted  soldiers  long  before  the  formal  introduction  of  conscription 
during  the  French  Revolution. 

Lynn's  classification  is  both  convincing  and  useful  as  an  analytical 
tool,  but  it  has  to  be  recognized  that  it  is  based  on  European  history  only. 
Several  "army  styles"  that  have  been  extremely  important  in  Asia  and  the 
Middle  East  in  the  early  modern  period  and  even  later  therefore  are  not 
included.  The  first  to  come  to  mind  is  that  of  the  "slave  army".  For  a  thousand 
years,  from  the  early  ninth  century  to  the  early  nineteenth,  mamluks  or 
ghulams,  soldiers  who  were  bought  as  slaves  by  rulers  outside  their  realm 
and  regarded  as  their  private  possessions,  were  a  prominent  feature  from 
Algiers  to  India.  Regions  as  far  apart  as  the  steppes  of  Central  Asia  and 
Ethiopia  exported  soldier-slaves  on  a  large  scale.  The  janissaries  of  the  Ot- 
toman Empire  clearly  belonged  to  the  same  category,  slave  troops,  although 
they  were  levied  within  the  Ottoman  domains  and  not  bought  abroad.  The 

10  Noted  military  historian  John  Lynn  unfortunately  had  to  withdraw  from  the  project  at  an 
early  stage,  but  he  kindly  supplied  a  written  commentary  that  served  as  the  basis  for  discussions 
in  the  Fighting  for  a  Living  working  party.  This  description  is  taken  from  p.  2  of  his  commentary. 


16 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


second  style  is  that  of  the  tribal  forces,  which  were  no  longer  an  important 
feature  of  warfare  in  early  modern  Europe,  but  remained  important  to  the 
Ottoman,  Mogul,  and  Chinese  Empires  until  their  demise. 

Naturally,  a  classification  of  army  styles  pertains  to  forms  of  military 
organization,  and  not  to  labour  relations.  The  temptation  is  great  to  assume 
that  the  different  army  styles  coincided  with  different  forms  of  labour 
relation,  but  as  the  case  studies  in  our  project  have  shown,  the  two  do  not 
necessarily  coincide.  While  in  what  we  may  perhaps  broadly  call  "feudal" 
armies  -  that  is  to  say,  in  armies  raised  by  landlords  from  among  their  own 
retinue  and  dependent  peasantry  -  one  type  of  labour  tributary  relation 
seems  to  dominate  (the  one  that  we  will  call  "tributary"),  the  studies  show 
us  that  not  only  can  two  or  more  army  styles  coexist,  in  a  single  army  style 
(for  instance,  a  state  commission  army  or  a  conscript  army),  different  labour 
relations  can  coexist  as  well.  In  other  words:  a  single  type  of  army  may 
contain  very  different  types  of  labour  relation.  Following  Lynn,  Michael 
Sikora  describes  how  the  Prussian  canton  system  was  a  "hybrid  military  or- 
ganization" with  a  standing  army  consisting  partly  of  foreigners  (designated 
as  mercenaries)  and  a  militia  within  one  structure.  Virginia  Aksan  in  her 
chapter  gives  a  particularly  rich  example.  In  1708,  the  military  population 
of  Damascus  consisted  of  local  janissaries  or  guards,  imperial  janissaries 
sent  from  Istanbul,  mercenaries  paid  by  the  governor  (who  themselves 
seem  to  have  been  composed  of  Anatolian  levends,  Kurdish  musketeers, 
and  North  Africans),  and  the  timariot  (or  sipahi)  cavalry  -  a  mixture  of 
forces  that  had  been  around  since  the  early  fifteenth  century  and  "army 
styles"  that  had  developed  in  the  seventeenth.  The  French  army  of  the  Third 
Republic  was  on  paper  a  conscript  army,  in  which  citizens  exercised  their 
right  and  duty  to  defend  their  fatherland,  but  like  all  nineteenth-century 
conscription  systems,  the  French  one  enabled  its  more  affluent  citizens 
to  pay  for  replacements,  an  opportunity  they  availed  themselves  of  on  a 
very  large  scale.  As  most  of  the  people  who  were  available  as  replacements 
were  soldiers  who  had  served  their  turn  but  because  of  their  long  service 
in  the  army  had  little  chance  of  a  job  in  civil  society,  the  conscript  army 
in  fact  consisted  to  a  considerable  degree  of  veteran  professionals.  The 
Italian  case,  studied  by  Marco  Rovinello,  reflects  the  same  reality,  but  in 
an  extreme  form:  the  state  was  quite  happy  that  the  extra  income  from 
bourgeois  "liberations"  (exemptions)  allowed  it  to  recruit  veterans  to  beef 
up  the  army  and,  accordingly,  no  fewer  than  forty-six  articles  of  the  1854 
regulations  detailed  "how  enlisted  people  can  be  exonerated  from  service". 
In  the  Netherlands,  too,  we  see  the  same  phenomenon  of  volunteers  re- 
engaging as  substitutes  after  the  reintroduction  of  conscription  in  1819-1828. 


INTRODUCTION 


17 


The  studies  in  this  book  are  about  soldiers,  not  about  officers.  Everywhere 
and  always,  the  officer  corps  was  treated  very  differently  from  the  rank  and 
file  and  had  its  own  set  of  labour  relations.  States  have  never  been  able  to 
recruit  or  control  armies  on  their  own.  They  have  always  needed  to  rely 
on  status  groups  (nobility,  landowners,  educated  middle  classes)  for  this, 
and  mechanisms  of  negotiation  rather  than  of  coercion  are  typical  of  the 
relationship  between  the  state  and  these  status  groups.  The  same  seems  to 
be  true  for  cavalry  forces,  which  only  rarely  seem  to  have  been  recruited 
through  coercion. 

We  are  faced  with  different  army  styles  that  succeed  each  other  but  in 
part  also  overlap,  and  we  also  note  that  within  a  single  identifiable  army 
style  a  variety  of  labour  relations  is  possible.  The  twenty  cases  studied  in 
the  context  of  the  project  in  total  yield  about  a  hundred  different  forms  of 
labour  relation.  As  I  shall  discuss  below,  there  are  several  reasons  for  this, 
but  one  of  them  is  that,  in  many  places,  smaller  forces  of  "experts"  coexisted 
with  the  mass  of  the  main  army:  from  the  European  Landsknechte  and 
Albanian  cavalry  to  the  Ottoman  and  later  Portuguese  artillery  experts 
in  the  Mogul  army  and  the  French  officers  of  Mehmed  Ali  Pasha's  new 
Egyptian  army,  armies  have  always  felt  the  need  to  employ  high-skilled 
specialists  for  specific  tasks.  The  seventeenth-century  Swedish  army  of 
Gustavus  Adolphus  II  offers  a  very  good  example  of  the  coexistence  of 
different  army  styles  and  labour  relations  within  a  single  institution.  In 
many  ways  the  most  modern  army  of  its  day,  it  rested  on  Europe's  oldest 
conscription  system,  but  at  the  same  time  the  Swedish  king  was  one  of  the 
biggest  employers  of  mercenaries  in  Europe  with  an  army,  only  12  per  cent 
of  which  consisted  of  native  Swedes. 

Once  we  have  learned  to  look  at  the  different  forms  of  military  labour  in 
terms  of  commonalities  rather  than  differences,  we  then  need  to  establish 
a  taxonomy  in  which  all  the  different  forms  of  military  employment  that 
have  occurred  in  the  different  areas  over  a  period  of  five  hundred  years  can 
find  a  place.  For  this  we  can  have  recourse  to  the  basic  threefold  division  of 
labour  relations  developed  earlier  in  the  IISH's  Global  Collaboratory  on  the 
History  of  Labour  Relations  1500-2000:  reciprocal  labour,  tributary  labour, 
and  commodifiedlabom.11  Providing  work  within  a  household  or  community 

11  Of  course,  one  could  argue  that  besides  the  three  broad  categories  outlined  (reciprocal, 
tributary,  and  commodified),  volunteerism  should  figure  as  a  fourth  variant.  There  are  several 
reasons  why  we  prefer  to  avoid  this.  First  of  all,  and  except  for  individual  cases,  it  is  almost 
impossible  to  get  accurate  information  about  people's  motivations  in  joining  the  military. 
Representatives  of  the  state  and  commanding  officers  may  grossly  misrepresent  people's 
mindset.  Even  if  the  soldiers  themselves  are  literate  and  write  about  it  in  ego-documents,  there 


18 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


(on  the  basis  of  shared  assumptions  about  obligations)  is  subsumed  under 
reciprocal  labour.  Workers  who  are  obliged  by  the  polity  (most  often  the 
state)  to  provide  work  are  categorized  as  tributary  labour.  Their  labour  is 
owned  by  the  polity.  In  the  third  category,  commodified  labour,  labour 
power  is  acquired  by  the  employer  (the  army,  the  state)  in  the  marketplace. 

Our  research  group  has  tried  to  place  the  different  phenomena  described 
in  the  case  studies  in  the  taxonomy  and  to  use  the  result  to  help  answer 
the  following  questions: 

1  How  can  we  explain  the  predominance  of  certain  types  of  labour  rela- 
tions, and  combinations  of  labour  relations,  in  certain  circumstances? 
and 

2  How  can  we  explain  the  replacement  of  one  dominant  system  by 
another? 

It  goes  without  saying  that  the  taxonomy  is  a  tool  to  make  fruitful  com- 
parison possible  and  should  not  be  forced  onto  historical  phenomena  as  a 
straitjacket. 

The  very  empirical  richness  that  makes  military  labour  such  an  attractive 
subject  to  a  social  historian  means  that  it  is  as  yet  too  early  to  give  a  defini- 
tive answer,  but  in  this  synthesis  I  should  like  to  present  some  preliminary 
findings  that  have  come  out  of  the  project.  The  aim  is  not  to  give  a  complete 
overview  of  the  cases  and  their  relevance,  but  to  illustrate  the  main  findings 
of  the  project  with  examples  taken  from  the  case  studies  in  order  to  give  a 
sense  of  what  is  possible  with  this  kind  of  comparative  approach,  both  in 
terms  of  testing  the  usefulness  of  the  basic  taxonomy  (reciprocal/tributary/ 
commodified)  and  in  terms  of  finding  determinants  for  the  dominance  of 
a  particular  system  of  army  recruitment  and  employment,  or  the  change 
from  one  system  to  another. 


is  no  telling  how  accurate  this  information  is.  It  may  be  a  rationalization  or  self-justification. 
Tradition,  economic  need,  or  social  pressure  may  force  people  to  volunteer  and  in  some  cases 
(as  the  US  Army  during  the  Vietnam  War)  volunteering  may  even  be  a  stratagem  to  avoid  being 
drafted  and  so  get  a  privileged  position  within  the  army.  It  is  not  the  volunteer  character  of 
the  "all-volunteer  force"  of  the  United  States  introduced  in  1973  that  is  relevant  for  us,  but  its 
all-professional  nature  and  the  fact  that  it  can  be  seen  as  a  form  of  free  and  commodified  labour. 


INTRODUCTION 


19 


Reciprocal,  tributary  and  commodified  labour 

To  determine  where  a  particular  form  of  military  labour  should  be  placed 
in  this  taxonomy,  we  can  look  at  the  following  variables: 

-  Income  (wages  or  fees,  high  or  low,  coin  or  kind,  regular/irregular); 

-  Duration  of  service  (short-term  contracts  to  lifelong  employment);  and 

-  Legal  constraints  (freedom  to  enter  or  leave  the  system,  to  change 
employers). 

The  reciprocal  form  of  labour  relations  perhaps  figures  least  in  our  stud- 
ies. Nevertheless,  we  see  references  to  the  use  of  tribal  forces  by  the  Ming 
emperors  in  China  and  by  the  Ottoman  sultans.  The  states  of  Hindustan 
often  had  recourse  to  Afghan  tribal  warriors.  Whether  the  Eight  Banners  of 
Ch'ing  China,  the  original  Manchu  tribal  forces,  represented  reciprocal  or 
tributary  labour  seems  debatable.  Perhaps  one  was  succeeded  by  the  other 
as  the  Manchu  tribal  chiefs  acquired  their  new  status  of  Chinese  emperor 
and  old  tribal  allegiances  were  given  a  place  in  the  Chinese  imperial  order. 
Local  militias  very  often  were  also  based  on  reciprocity:  there  was  a  gener- 
ally recognized  mutual  obligation  within  closely  knit  communities  to  share 
the  burden  of  defence.  But  when  state,  or  "national",  armies  were  built  by 
incorporating  these  militias  into  centralized  structures  commanded  by 
professional  officers,  as  we  see  in  Ming  China  or  ancien  regime  France,  but 
also  during  the  American  War  of  Independence,  militias  evolved  into  a  kind 
of  primitive  conscription  system.  The  gradual  transformation  of  militias 
that  were  primarily  a  form  of  reciprocal  labour  bound  up  in  local  duties 
to  protect  the  community,  into  a  form  of  permanent  duty  to  the  state,  is 
traced  by  Sikora  to  early  seventeenth-century  Germany.  The  problem  is 
that  the  term  "militia"  is  really  too  all-embracing.  Clearly  for  any  analysis 
the  terminology  would  need  to  be  refined  to  make  a  clear  distinction 
between  militia  systems  in  which  the  influence  of  local  society  dominates 
and  those  governed  by  the  interests  of  the  state.  Frank  Tallett  describes 
how  first  France  under  Louis  XIV  and  then  many  German  states  developed 
the  militia  system  to  create  a  trained  manpower  pool  that  could  be  drafted 
into  the  army  as  the  need  arose.  In  these  systems,  which  culminated  in 
the  Prussian  canton  system,  clearly  a  tributary  rather  than  a  reciprocal 
relationship  dominates.  The  roots  of  modern  conscription  clearly  lie  in  the 
militia  system  of  France,  which  already  used  a  form  of  conscription  with 
the  attendant  mechanisms  of  a  draft  and  exemptions.  On  the  other  hand 
we  can  also  argue  that,  at  the  lowest  level  of  early  conscription  systems 
like  those  of  seventeenth-century  Sweden  or  eighteenth-century  Russia, 


20 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


the  fact  that  the  local  village  community,  which  was  charged  with  deliver- 
ing recruits  under  the  supervision  of  the  landed  nobility,  spread  out  the 
burden  of  conscription  in  much  the  same  way  as  it  shared  out  the  use 
of  common  lands  or  the  obligation  of  agricultural  labour  means  that  a 
degree  of  reciprocity  -  an  equal  sharing  of  burdens  and  benefits  within 
the  community  -  was  involved.  As  Elise  Kimerling  Wirtschafter  notes, 
at  least  until  the  codification  of  recruitment  rules  in  1831,  the  practices  of 
peasants  and  local  landlords  determined  the  recruitment  process  in  Russia. 
We  can  also  note  that  followers  of  military  leaders  who  themselves  had 
a  contractual  relationship  with  the  court  or  the  state  were  tied  to  these 
leaders  through  bonds  of  kinship  or  patronage  and  that  because  of  this  their 
labour  relations  with  their  commanders  were  of  a  reciprocal  nature  even  if 
this  relationship  was  itself  part  of  a  larger  system  in  which  other  types  of 
labour  relation  (the  free  commodified  labour  of  the  mercenary)  dominated. 
The  Scottish  mercenaries  quite  often  seem  to  fall  into  this  category,  but, 
as  Herman  Amersfoort  notes,  Swiss  mercenaries  in  early  modern  Europe 
often  had  kinship  ties  with  their  recruiters  as  well.  As  all  of  these  examples 
demonstrate,  reciprocity  should  not  be  confused  with  equality. 

The  large  majority  of  military  labour  relations  and  recruitment  prac- 
tices surveyed  in  our  project  fall  into  one  of  the  other  two  categories  of 
the  IISH  Collaboratory  on  the  History  of  Labour  Relations:  tributary  or 
commodified.  Tributary  labour  occurs  when  the  official  position  of  the 
state  is  that  serving  in  the  military  is  an  obligation  that  can  be  legally 
imposed  and  that  is  essentially  interchangeable  with  the  categories  of 
tax  and  corvee  -  other  obligations  imposed  by  the  state.  This  concept  is 
usually  well  understood  by  the  populations  as  is  evident  from  the  name 
given  in  France  to  conscription  -  the  "blood  tax".  The  precise  form  that 
the  tributary  labour  relationship  takes  can  vary  from  legal  enslavement 
(as  in  the  Ottoman  devsirme)  to  levies  for  specific  campaigns,  hereditary 
obligations  (as  in  the  case  of  the  Ming  where  households  were  obliged  to 
provide  one  member  of  the  household  for  military  service  instead  of  corvee 
or  tax  obligations)  and  early  and  modern  forms  of  conscription.  In  levies 
and  early  forms  of  conscription  the  obligation  is  typically  imposed  on  a 
community  (the  "People's  Stalwarts"  of  the  Ming  or  the  peasants  of  the 
Russian  mir)  while  in  modern  conscription  systems  it  is  essentially  an 
individual  duty  incumbent  on  the  citizen.  Tributary  and  reciprocal  forms 
intermingle  in  the  case  of  tribes  that  have  a  tributary  relationship  with, 
for  instance,  the  Mogul,  Ottoman  or  Ming  Empire,  but  that  mobilize  their 
own  tribal  warriors  on  the  basis  of  reciprocity. 


INTRODUCTION 


21 


The  second  quite  common  category  is  that  of  commodified  labour.  This 
seems  to  be  the  category  into  which  both  the  aggregate  contract  army 
and  the  state  commission  army  of  Lynn's  classification  fall.  Typical  for 
these  categories  is  that  there  is  a  contractual  relationship  for  a  limited 
time  between  the  court  or  state  on  the  one  hand  and  the  military  on  the 
other.  Both  the  modern  volunteer  army  (like  the  all-volunteer  force  of  the 
United  States  studied  by  Beth  Bailey)  and  the  contractors  operating  in  Iraq 
or  Afghanistan,  on  whom  Yelda  Kaya  reports,  fall  into  this  category  as  well. 

A  complicating  factor  is  that  different  types  of  labour  relationships 
sometimes  figure  on  different  levels  of  a  single  system.  In  analogy  to  food 
chains  or  commodity  chains,  one  could  perhaps  speak  about  "recruitment 
chains".  An  early  modern  European  state  may  contract  a  mercenary  colonel, 
who  will  then  contract  with  officers,  often  from  the  nobility,  who  will 
bring  to  the  army  peasants  from  their  feudal  estates,  who  have  a  tributary 
relationship  with  their  lord.  The  fact  that  early  modern  states,  whether 
European,  Middle  Eastern,  or  Indian,  as  a  rule  relied  on  the  landlords  or 
notables  to  execute  levies  on  a  local  level  opened  the  door  to  all  kinds  of 
combinations  of  reciprocal  and  tributary  systems,  with  the  local  notables 
and  officials  sometimes  becoming  military  contractors.  In  the  Ottoman 
army  of  the  nineteenth  century  and  right  up  until  the  First  World  War,  Kurd- 
ish tribal  chiefs  were  given  officer  rank  and  placed  in  the  army  hierarchy, 
but  it  proved  impossible  to  impose  regular  army  discipline  on  the  Kurdish 
units  commanded  by  these  officers,  because  the  rank  and  file  recognized 
only  tribal  allegiance,  not  the  hierarchy  of  the  army.  Theirs  was  a  reciprocal 
mini-system  within  a  tributary  (because  conscription-based)  whole  of  the 
Ottoman  army,  with  free  commodified  labour  (the  officers)  at  the  top.  A 
particularly  complex  case  is  that  of  the  Soldatenhandel  discussed  by  Tallett 
and  Lynn.  The  soldiers  hired  out  by,  for  instance,  the  state  of  Hesse-Cassel 
to  the  British  crown,  were  hired  and  had  no  interest  in  the  British  cause, 
and  in  that  sense  and  on  that  level  they  were  mercenaries;  but,  one  level 
down,  they  had  in  most  cases  been  recruited  by  their  own  state  through 
a  form  of  coercion,  be  it  a  cantonal  militia  system  or  impressment.  If  they 
were  "volunteers",  it  was  often  in  the  form  of  indentured  labour  to  pay  off 
family  debts.  Robert  Johnson  gives  the  example  of  the  native  soldiers  of  the 
East  India  Company  Army,  who  enlisted  as  volunteers,  but  who  at  the  same 
time  were  offered  to  the  army  by  the  heads  of  their  families,  who  expected 
these  family  members  to  serve  out  of  tradition  (and  undoubtedly  to  add  to 
the  family  income  or  at  least  save  having  to  feed  an  extra  mouth).  This  is 
a  case  of  a  commodified  labour  relation  on  top  of  a  tributary  or  possibly 
even  reciprocal  one. 


22 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


In  order  to  create  a  basis  for  comparative  analysis  of  all  these  forms  of 
military  labour  relations,  we  need  to  find  a  common  language  to  describe 
the  phenomena,  one  that  is  not  bound  up  exclusively  in  the  historical 
development  of  one  of  the  regions  studied.  In  other  words:  rather  than 
busy  ourselves  overmuch  with  the  question  of  whether  the  timar  system 
of  the  Ottoman  Empire  or  the  mansabdari  system  in  Mogul  India  is  a  form 
of  feudalism  (which  is,  after  all,  a  term  from  European  social  history),  we 
should  recognize  that  for  hundreds  of  years  states  have  been  in  need  of 
a  form  of  military  service  in  which  soldiers,  mostly  relatively  expensive 
mounted  warriors,  were  remunerated  with  land  or  the  usufruct  of  land  in 
exchange  for  exclusive  service  to  one  court  or  state. 

Pay  and  labour  relations 

The  question  of  pay  does  not  in  itself  determine  in  which  category  (tributary 
or  commodified)  the  different  forms  of  military  labour  should  be  placed, 
although  it  can  be  an  indicator:  the  porters  recruited  by  the  Ch'ing  army 
from  native  tribes  were  not  paid  when  they  carried  foodstuffs  for  their 
chieftain,  because  their  work  was  considered  corvee,  but  they  were  paid 
when  employed  directly  by  the  state,  so  the  very  same  work  was  tributary  in 
one  context  and  commodified  in  the  other.  It  is  true  that  defining  military 
service  as  a  duty  analogous  to  the  payment  of  taxes  allows  the  state  to 
escape  the  need  to  compete  in  the  labour  market  and  therefore  to  offer 
competitive  wages,  but  most  troops  in  tributary  systems  were  in  fact  paid. 
The  Chinese  Empire,  for  example,  did  pay  its  garrison  troops  during  the 
Ming  era,  even  if  these  troops  were  made  up  of  members  of  hereditary 
military  households  that  were  obliged  to  produce  soldiers,  and  the  Ot- 
tomans paid  their  janissary  troops  handsomely,  even  if  legally  they  were 
the  sultan's  slaves  and  the  members  of  the  corps  had  originally  been  levied 
as  a  form  of  tax-in-kind  in  Christian  Balkan  villages. 

On  the  other  hand,  mercenaries  and  state-commissioned  armies  - 
examples  of  commodified  labour  -  were  often  paid  badly.  Mercenaries 
could  be  compensated  by  giving  them  the  right  to  pillage  (about  which 
more  later)  but  once  armies  grew  in  size  and  permanence  (something  that 
seems  to  have  happened  in  China  five  hundred  years  before  it  happened 
in  seventeenth-century  Europe),  states  were  forced  to  allow  soldiers  to  pay 
their  way  (and  earn  a  living),  either  by  doing  non-military  labour  for  the 
state  (road  repair  being  a  popular  option  all  over  the  world)  or  by  producing 
goods  for  the  market.  Otherwise,  these  mass  armies  would  simply  have  been 


INTRODUCTION 


23 


unaffordable.  Here  the  Russian  example  is  very  clear.  The  soldiers  of  the 
Russian  army  were  nominally  full-time  soldiers,  but  they  were  allowed  to 
do  productive  work  and  even  benefit  from  their  own  workshops  and  farms 
while  they  were  garrisoned.  The  tributary  labour  of  the  soldiers  thus  became 
partly  commodified.  Standing  armies,  such  as  state-commissioned  armies 
in  early  modern  Europe,  the  Ottoman  janissary  garrisons,  or  the  military 
households  of  the  Ming,  could  (and  in  fact  had  to)  reduce  their  costs  by 
allowing  soldiers  to  become  part-time  producers.  The  garrison  troops  of  the 
Ming  military  households  spent  most  of  their  time  in  agricultural  labour, 
not  on  military  duties  and  half  of  the  grain  they  raised  in  the  fields  had  to 
be  handed  over  to  the  local  garrison  to  cover  the  expenses  of  the  troops. 
Janissaries  very  often  became  co-owners  of  shops  in  the  bazaar  in  cities 
such  as  Istanbul,  Damascus,  Aleppo,  or  Cairo  and,  as  Gilles  Veinstein  notes, 
this  was  not  some  form  of  "degeneration"  of  the  corps  in  the  seventeenth  or 
eighteenth  century:  it  had  always  been  part  of  the  system.  Problems  arose 
only  when  the  janissaries  became  primarily  involved  in  non-military  trades. 

If  it  is  true  that  many  soldiers  in  standing  armies  were  part-time  agricul- 
turalists or  artisans,  the  reverse  is  also  true:  peasants  and  artisans  could 
become  part-time  or  short-term  soldiers.  Dirk  Kolff  in  his  description  of  the 
north  Indian  labour  market  makes  the  point  that  we  should  primarily  look 
at  soldiering  as  part  of  the  survival  strategy  of  families  and  village  com- 
munities. Peasants  could  turn  into  weavers  or  soldiers  as  the  opportunity 
arose,  and  making  use  of  the  full  range  of  opportunities  was  a  sensible  living 
strategy  for  families.  For  this  reason,  the  Hindustani  villagers  equipped 
themselves  with  firearms  on  a  massive  scale,  much  as  they  would  acquire 
or  make  looms  or  hoes.  It  is  very  likely  that  a  similar  logic  holds  true  for  the 
communities  that  delivered  levends  to  the  Ottoman  army  and  for  villages 
in  south-western  Germany  that  provided  Landsknechte.  Spreading  the  risk 
is  an  essential  strategy  for  peasant  communities,  and  seasonal  soldiering 
could  compensate  for  a  bad  harvest. 

Forms  of  remuneration 

Basically,  the  state  has  three  options  in  the  way  it  remunerates  its  soldiers: 
through  the  apportioning  or  the  usufruct  of  land;  through  cash  payment  or 
payment  in  moveable  goods;  or  through  granting  rights,  notably  the  right 
to  pillage.  The  granting  of  land  or  usufruct  was  always  a  popular  option  for 
cash-strapped  states.  It  had  clear  advantages  for  societies  with  low  levels  of 
monetization,  and  it  seems  to  have  been  the  preferred  option  for  relatively 


24 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


expensive  cavalry  forces  and  commanding  officers  in  medieval  Europe  as 
well  as  in  India  and  the  Middle  East  in  the  early  modern  period.  Generally 
the  rank  and  file  were  paid  in  cash  or  kind,  but  both  in  Europe  (Cossacks, 
Croats  on  the  Austrian  military  border)  and  in  China  (Banner  troops)  we 
see  the  phenomenon  of  troops  settled  on  the  borders  as  colonists,  who  were 
given  land  in  the  area  they  settled. 

Both  copper  and  silver  played  an  important  role  in  systems  based  on  cash 
payments.  Where  soldiers  were  paid  on  a  weekly  or  monthly  basis,  copper 
coin  seems  to  have  been  used  frequently,  while  silver  was  preferred  when 
larger  sums  were  involved,  as  for  signing  bonuses  or  payments  of  arrears. 
In  the  Chinese  army,  soldiers  were  paid  in  copper  when  in  their  garrisons, 
but  in  silver  when  on  campaign,  as  carrying  large  amounts  of  copper  coin 
would  have  been  too  burdensome. 

Generally,  cash  payment  became  more  widespread  after  the  flow  of  silver 
from  the  Spanish  Americas  started,  but  it  was  primarily  an  attractive  option 
for  states  with  a  high  degree  of  centralization  and  huge  powers  of  extraction 
(the  Chinese  Empire  being  in  a  class  of  its  own  in  this  respect)  or  states  with 
highly  developed  credit  and  banking  systems  like  the  Italian  city-states, 
the  Dutch  Republic,  or  Britain.  Spain  and  Japan  were  in  an  exceptional 
position  in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  because  their  direct 
access  to  rich  silver  stocks  gave  them  a  unique  ability  to  raise  troops  for 
cash.  For  most  early  modern  European  states,  however,  but  also  for  the 
Ottoman  Empire,  raising  the  cash  for  the  aggregate  contract  armies  of  the 
sixteenth  and  early  seventeenth  centuries  and  for  the  expanding  armies  of 
the  later  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries  was,  of  course,  notoriously 
difficult.  One  way  of  overcoming  the  problem  was  by  allowing  soldiers  to 
raise  their  income  by  granting  them  the  right  to  pillage.  As  both  Lynn  and 
Tallett  show,  for  the  mercenaries  in  the  armies  of  the  Thirty  Years  War  this 
source  of  income  was  far  more  important  than  their  nominal  wage,  and 
Tallett  clearly  has  a  point  when  he  says  that  this  makes  the  soldier  less  a 
wage-earner  than  a  petty  entrepreneur.  While  this  kind  of  remuneration 
seems  to  have  lost  its  importance  in  Europe  from  the  mid-seventeenth 
century  onwards  as  states  grew  stronger  and  increased  their  ability  to  raise 
taxes  (as  Charles  Tilly  has  famously  argued),  it  continued  in  other  areas.  As 
Mehmet  Besikci  shows,  the  Ottoman  Empire  in  1914  gave  volunteer  bands 
the  right  to  collect  "donations"  from  the  local  population,  acting  as  a  kind 
of  de facto  tax  collector. 

In  addition  to  regular  pay,  there  are  many  examples  of  bonus  and  incen- 
tive systems  in  the  form  of  rewards  for  valour  in  battle,  for  the  number  of 
enemies  killed,  for  signing  up,  or  for  extending  one's  service.  Aksan  quotes 


INTRODUCTION 


25 


the  memoirs  of  an  Ottoman  soldier  of  the  early  nineteenth  century,  who 
confesses  to  cutting  off  the  heads  of  unsuspecting  Christian  villagers  with 
the  intention  of  handing  them  in  as  proof  of  the  number  of  enemies  he  had 
killed.  When  he  then  meets  a  company  of  janissaries,  the  first  thing  they  do 
is  to  rob  him  of  his  heads.  The  incentive,  both  for  him  and  for  the  janissaries, 
is  not  bloodthirstiness  or  fanaticism,  but  simple  material  gain  -  the  heads 
represent  a  source  of  extra  income  in  the  form  of  a  bonus.  Signing  bonuses 
were  a  double-edged  sword  for  the  recruiters,  however.  On  the  one  hand, 
the  immediate  attraction  of  an  up-front  payment  in  cash  was  hard  to  resist 
for  many  poor  peasants  or  casual  labourers  in  the  towns,  so  they  were  very 
effective.  On  the  other  hand,  the  cash  in  hand  gave  recruits  the  means  of 
survival  (albeit  a  for  a  limited  period),  and  deserting  immediately  after  the 
receipt  of  the  bonus  seems  to  have  been  a  common  strategy  for  recruits  the 
world  over.  Signing  bonuses  were  expensive  for  the  state  or  its  recruiters 
and,  as  Sikora  points  out,  imposing  military  service  as  a  duty  (in  other  words, 
turning  it  into  tributary  labour),  for  instance,  in  the  form  of  state-controlled 
militias,  saved  a  great  deal  of  money. 

Perhaps  a  distinction  should  be  made  between  the  right  granted  to 
soldiers  to  live  off  the  land  and  exact  "contributions"  from  the  population, 
especially  in  enemy  territory,  which  can  be  regarded  as  a  form  of  regular 
income,  and  the  right  to  pillage,  for  instance  after  the  taking  of  a  town, 
which,  because  of  its  unpredictable  nature,  can  more  properly  be  regarded 
as  a  bonus  or  incentive. 

Throughout  the  period  studied  there  seem  to  have  been  huge  differences 
in  remuneration  between  officers  and  troops,  in  both  Europe  and  Asia, 
but  also  between  the  well-trained  professionals  that  were  hired  for  their 
expertise  (and  who  on  the  whole  were  much  smaller  in  number)  and  large 
masses  of  peasant  soldiers  with  only  basic  skills.  Officers  were  not  only 
much  better  remunerated,  either  in  land/usufruct  or  cash,  but  in  many  cases 
(European  and  Indian  mercenaries  seem  to  be  prime  examples)  officers 
also  functioned  as  recruiters  and  were  regarded,  as  Amersfoort  says,  as 
"owners"  of  their  regiments.  This  allowed  them  to  run  their  units  as  private 
enterprises  and  turn  military  service  into  a  very  profitable  business.  As 
Amersfoort  shows,  getting  rid  of  these  intermediaries,  who  controlled  the 
military  labour  market,  was  a  strong  argument  in  favour  of  the  establish- 
ment of  cadre-militia  or  conscript  armies  in  the  nineteenth  century. 

The  professional  mercenaries  of  early  modern  Europe,  the  Household 
Men  of  Ming  China,  and  the  Ottoman  janissaries,  with  their  strong  cor- 
porate identity  and  hierarchy  based  on  skill  and  experience,  can  perhaps 
best  be  compared  to  guild  members  and  artisans.  Landsknechte  regarded 


26 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


their  units  as  independent  corporations  and  as  a  rule  even  elected  their 
own  officers  without  interference  from  any  state.  The  soldiers  of  the  mass 
armies  raised  in  eighteenth-century  France  or  Prussia,  the  levends  of  the 
Ottoman  Empire,  the  garrison  troops  of  the  Ming,  or  the  Green  Standard 
forces  of  the  Ch'ing  can  be  more  usefully  compared  with  unskilled  labour. 
The  evidence  seems  to  show  that  pay  levels  for  this  type  of  soldier  were  fairly 
consistent  with  wages  being  paid  at  the  lower  end  of  the  civilian  labour 
market,  in  both  Europe  and  Asia.  Where  soldiers  were  recruited  in  the 
labour  market,  the  army  generally  seems  to  have  been  an  employer  of  last 
resort,  as  shown  by  the  fact  that  recruitment  generally  was  easier  in  times 
of  economic  crisis,  or  in  the  seasons  with  little  agricultural  work,  when  it 
was  hard  to  find  other  jobs.  The  trump  card  of  armies  no  doubt  was  the 
fact  that,  apart  from  the  basic  wage,  they  offered  a  degree  of  security  in  the 
form  of  board  and  lodging,  however  dismal  it  may  have  been. 

When  discussing  the  remuneration  of  soldiers  it  is  important  to  include 
the  long-term  effects  as  well  as  the  immediate  reward.  Some  of  the  most 
valuable  elements  of  remuneration  may  be  in  the  shape  of  future  rewards 
such  as  upward  social  mobility,  land,  pensions  or  (in  the  modern  state) 
insurance,  and  educational  opportunities  for  the  soldiers  themselves  or 
their  children.  This  is  true  of  civilian  labour  as  well,  of  course,  but  armies 
have  often  pioneered  this  kind  of  remuneration  scheme.  Especially  in  the 
late  twentieth  century  the  cost  of  the  non-pay  elements  in  the  total  remu- 
neration of  soldiers  became  very  considerable.  As  Kaya  writes  (citingjames 
Jay  Carafano),  in  the  US  Army  it  doubles  the  cost  of  employing  a  soldier. 

The  duration  of  military  service 

When  we  look  at  the  practices  in  Europe  and  Asia  in  the  past  five  hundred 
years,  the  basic  distinction  we  see  in  the  term  of  service  is  that  between 
long-term  and  short-term.  Long-term  service  seems  to  be  associated  with 
reciprocal  and  tributary  labour  relations.  The  most  extreme  form  is,  of 
course,  military  service  that  is  in  principle  an  engagement  for  the  rest  of 
a  person's  life,  as  was  the  case  with  the  Ottoman  janissaries,  mamluks, 
sipahis  and  mansabdars,  Ming  household  troops,  and  Ch'ing  Eight  Banner 
forces.  Obligations  within  (reciprocal)  tribal  systems  are  also  generally  of 
a  lifelong  nature. 

Still  long-term,  although  not  lifelong,  was  the  obligation  that  came  with 
militia  and  canton  systems  and  more  generally,  with  the  state  commission 
armies  in  Europe  and,  for  instance,  the  Green  Standard  Army  of  the  Ch'ing. 


INTRODUCTION 


27 


In  the  modern  all-volunteer  army,  military  service  is  defined  as  a  career 
and  therefore  fundamentally  seen  as  a  long-term  engagement  but,  as  it 
is  contract-based,  the  labour  relation  cannot  be  defined  as  tributary  and 
long-term  service  cannot  be  enforced. 

At  the  opposite  side  of  the  spectrum  we  find  the  short-term  contracts 
of  mercenaries,  tribal  auxiliaries,  and  levies  such  as  the  Ottoman  levends. 
Sometimes  these  were  hired  for  a  single  campaign  season,  but  more  gener- 
ally the  -  often  implicit  rather  than  explicit  -  term  of  contract  seems  to 
have  been  until  the  end  of  the  present  conflict  or  emergency. 

One  system  of  recruitment  moved  from  long-term  to  short-term  over 
time:  conscription.  In  the  older  (seventeenth-  and  eighteenth-century) 
conscription  systems,  such  as  the  Russian  and  the  Swedish,  service  was  for 
an  indefinite  term,  which  in  practice  usually  meant  twenty-five  to  thirty 
years.  In  the  modern  conscription  systems  introduced  in  the  nineteenth 
century  the  term  of  service  was  much  more  limited  and  in  general  was 
lowered  significantly  over  the  course  of  the  century.  Hence,  the  mass 
conscript  armies  of  the  century  between  1870  and  1970,  with  their  two-  to 
three-year  service,  formed  a  halfway  house  between  the  lifelong  soldier 
and  the  soldier  engaged  for  one  single  campaign  that  is  so  characteristic  of 
earlier  times.  It  has  to  be  remembered,  however,  that  all  conscript  armies 
have  been  built  around  a  core  of  long-term  professionals. 

Free  or  unfree?  Legal  constraints 

The  problem  with  determining  whether  soldiers  in  the  different  armies  can 
be  classified  as  free  or  unfree  labour  is  complex.  Soldiers  serving  within 
a  system  of  reciprocal  obligations  must  at  all  times  count  as  unfree  (as 
reneging  on  the  communal  obligation  usually  carries  a  very  high  social 
cost),  but  very  few  soldiers  in  history  have  been  legally  completely  free 
actors  in  the  sense  that  they  could  terminate  or  change  their  employment 
without  being  subject  to  prosecution  under  criminal  law.  In  almost  every 
country,  joining  the  army  altered  people's  legal  status.  In  most  cases  this 
restricted  their  freedom,  but  in  the  case  of  Russia  the  opposite  was  true: 
conscription  turned  serfs  into  free  men  (and  their  wives  into  free  women), 
albeit  free  men  subject  to  military  discipline.  As  in  many  other  fields,  the 
prototypical  Marxian  free  worker  historically  seems  to  have  been  a  quite 
exceptional  phenomenon  in  the  world  of  the  military.  In  his  essay  "Who  Are 
the  Workers?",  Marcel  van  der  Linden  has  argued  that  "there  is  an  almost 
endless  variety  of  producers  in  capitalism,  and  the  intermediate  forms 


28 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


between  the  different  categories  are  fluid  rather  than  sharply  defined".12 
He  gives  examples  of  slaves  working  voluntarily  for  wages  part  of  their 
time,  and  he  also  points  out  that  "free"  wage-labourers  have  at  times  been 
locked  up  by  their  employers,  a  practice  that  in  countries  such  as  China  or 
India  is  still  a  regular  occurrence.  Our  research  seems  to  confirm  the  truth 
of  this  statement. 

Members  of  aggregate  contract  armies  undoubtedly  come  closest  to  the 
status  of  free  worker.  In  theory  they  were  free  to  choose  their  employer, 
which  gave  them  some  negotiating  power,  and  their  contracts  were  of 
limited  duration,  although,  as  James  Miller  notes,  the  actual  term  of  service 
often  seems  to  have  been  unrecorded.  The  premise  seems  to  have  been  that 
soldiers  served  as  long  as  hostilities  required  their  presence.  But  even  the 
mercenaries  were  subject  to  articles  of  war  once  they  had  signed  up  and 
received  their  bonus.  According  to  a  decree  of  December  1789  quoted  by 
Hippler,  the  soldiers  of  the  French  revolutionary  army  would  lose  their  civic 
rights  for  the  duration  of  their  (voluntary)  service  and  even  the  all-volunteer 
force  of  the  United  States,  which,  according  to  Bailey,  in  the  1970s  explicitly 
sought  to  redefine  military  service  from  a  citizen's  obligation  to  the  state 
to  just  another  form  of  labour,  comparable  to  work  in  services  or  industry, 
subjected  its  soldiers  to  a  legal  regime  distinct  from  the  civilian  code.  The 
criminalization  of  breach  of  contract  seems  to  be  an  enduring  characteristic 
of  military  employment  that  sets  it  apart  from  most  civilian  labour  relations. 

Appearances  can  be  deceptive:  the  Ottoman  janissaries  were  technically 
possessions  of  their  sultan,  but  had  accumulated  traditional  rights,  which 
they  guarded  jealously,  much  like  a  guild.  Many  of  the  janissary  mutinies 
that  occurred  from  the  seventeenth  to  the  early  nineteenth  centuries 
started  as  "industrial  actions"  or  pay  disputes,  when  they  interpreted 
government  measures  as  unjustly  transgressing  on  their  acquired  rights.13 
On  the  other  hand,  soldiers  who  signed  up  of  their  own  accord,  as  free 
men,  for  an  eighteenth-century  state  commission  army  were  faced  with 
draconian  regulations  and  frequent  physical  abuse,  which  in  armies  such 
as  the  Prussian  could  be  quite  as  bad  as  what  plantation  slaves  had  to  face. 

When  judging  conditions  of  service,  whether  in  terms  of  pay  or  in  terms 
of  the  opposition  free/unfree,  we  should  always  take  into  account  contem- 
porary conditions  in  society  at  large.  Conditions  of  service  that  may  seem 
unfair  or  even  atrocious  in  our  eyes  may  have  looked  very  different  to  a 
Scottish  day  labourer,  a  Russian  serf,  or  a  Hindustani  peasant.  The  status 

12  Van  der  Linden,  "Who  Are  the  Workers?" 

13  See  Stremmelaar,  "Justice  and  Revenge  in  the  Ottoman  Rebellion  of  1703". 


INTRODUCTION 


29 


of  free  actor  in  the  labour  market,  as  enjoyed  by  a  European  mercenary 
or  a  Rajput  warrior,  historically  is  the  exception  rather  than  the  rule,  and 
that  is  true  for  the  military  profession  just  as  much  as  for  society  at  large. 

Determinants:  general  considerations 

Hopefully,  the  preceding  paragraphs  have  shown  that  it  is  possible  to 
classify  the  different  forms  of  military  labour  by  looking  at  their  shared 
characteristics  and  to  place  them  in  a  taxonomy  based  on  a  distinction 
between  reciprocal,  tributary,  and  commodified  labour.  Taking  into  account 
the  variables  of  remuneration,  term  of  service,  and  legal  status,  we  can  try 
to  gauge  which  factors  influence  the  choice  for  a  particular  form  of  military 
employment  on  the  part  of  the  state:  in  other  words,  which  were  the  most 
important  determinants? 

All  forms  of  military  recruitment  and  labour  represent  different  solutions 
to  shared  problems.  To  find  the  determinants,  we  first  have  to  look  at  the 
basic  problems  and  aspirations  of  the  people  and  the  state.  As  a  rule,  people 
like  to  be  left  alone.  Outside  the  ruling  elite,  they  are  fully  occupied  by  their 
daily  concerns  to  make  a  living,  to  preserve  their  health,  to  protect  their 
children,  and,  in  the  more  dynamic  societies,  also  to  gain  advancement 
or  amass  wealth.  They  are  prepared  to  defend  their  homes  and  families 
and  throughout  recorded  history  they  have  also  shown  themselves  ready 
to  defend  the  larger  community  of  which  they  perceive  themselves  to  be 
a  part:  the  village,  the  town,  or  the  tribe.  Indeed,  in  some  societies  (those 
of  border  and  highland  Scotland,  of  Albania,  and  of  the  Central  Asian 
steppes,  for  instance),  small-scale  local  armed  conflict  was  the  normal 
state  of  things,  and  it  is  no  coincidence  that  these  societies  produced  highly 
sought-after  soldiers.  Of  course,  history  is  also  riddled  with  instances  in 
which  people  have  united  in  much  larger,  more  anonymous  groups  to  fight 
in  a  "cause":  the  crusades  in  medieval  Europe,  rebellions  such  as  those  of  the 
Celalis  in  the  early  seventeenth-century  Ottoman  Empire  or  the  Tai  Pings 
in  nineteenth-century  China.  Sometimes  hundreds  of  thousands,  even 
millions,  of  people  have  taken  part  in  these  armed  movements,  but  two 
characteristics  distinguish  these  movements  from  the  kind  of  organized 
violence  we  discuss  in  our  project:  they  are  generally  short-lived  (even  the 
longest  lasting  only  about  fifteen  years,  most  being  much  shorter)  and  at 
least  at  the  start  spontaneous.  In  our  project  we  deal  with  military  systems 
established  by  states  for  the  longer  term. 


30 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


States  therefore  have  a  problem:  it  is  very  difficult  to  get  people  to  devote 
themselves  exclusively  or  predominantly,  on  a  permanent  basis,  to  fighting, 
killing,  and  dying  in  the  service  of  distant  entities  such  as  courts  or  abstract 
notions  such  as  the  state  or  the  nation.  Yet  this  is  exactly  what  princes  and 
states  need.  Faced  with  the  need  to  raise  soldiers,  states  have  a  basic  choice 
between  two  options.  To  put  it  in  Gramscian  terms  they  can  either  coerce 
people  into  serving  or  convince  them  to  do  so  through  the  establishment  of 
a  hegemonic  cultural  code,  in  other  words,  to  create  a  measure  of  consent. 
Both  coercion  and  consent  have  obvious  advantages  and  disadvantages, 
which  are  well  known  from  the  debates  about  slavery  versus  wage  labour.14 
At  first  sight  the  hiring  of  professionals,  in  the  form  of  both  mercenaries  and 
standing  armies,  may  seem  the  more  expensive  option,  because  it  makes 
high  demands  on  the  state's  ability  to  pay  and  often  forces  the  state  to 
compete  with  other  employers  in  the  labour  market,  but  at  least  mercenaries 
(but  also  levies)  have  the  huge  advantage  that  they  can  be  contracted  for  a 
single  campaign  season  or  emergency  only  and  that  they  can  be  disbanded 
thereafter.  This  seems  to  have  been  the  practice  in  India  and  Europe  as  early 
as  the  fourteenth  century,  but  also  in  the  Middle  East  from  the  seventeenth 
century  onwards.  Coercion  may  seem  cheap,  but  it  is  more  expensive  than 
it  appears  at  first  sight,  because  of  the  need  for  forceful  recruitment  and 
constant  supervision  after  soldiers  have  been  recruited.  Like  slaves,  coerced 
soldiers  may  also  be  less  motivated  or  "productive"  than  those  who  have 
joined  the  colours  of  their  own  free  will.  In  the  Ottoman  army  in  the  First 
World  War,  conscripted  Arab  soldiers  were  sometimes  marched  to  the  front 
in  chains  and  this  army  had  the  highest  proportion  of  deserters  by  far  of  all 
armies  engaged  in  the  war. 

On  the  other  hand,  coercion  allows  the  state  to  escape  the  need  to 
compete  in  the  labour  market.  It  does  not  have  to  entice  people  to  become 
soldiers  with  signing  bonuses  nor  does  it  have  to  pay  wages  in  conformity 
with  the  market.  Ultimately,  what  is  the  decisive  factor  may  not  be  cost 
in  itself,  but  value  for  money  or,  in  other  words,  cost-effectiveness.  It  is 
extremely  difficult  to  introduce  the  concept  of  "productivity"  into  discus- 
sions on  military  labour.  After  all,  what  is  a  soldier's  productivity  when  he 
is  engaged  in  his  core  business  of  fighting  and  killing?  Is  it  the  measure  of 
destruction  he  manages  to  inflict  on  the  enemy?  Or  is  it  the  degree  to  which 
his  activities  help  to  enlarge  the  tax  base  of  the  state  through  conquests, 
or  further  the  economic  interests  of  the  elites  that  control  the  state?  In 
economics,  productivity  is  the  total  production  divided  by  the  necessary 


14    Fenoaltea,  "Slavery  and  Supervision  in  Comparative  Perspective". 


INTRODUCTION 


31 


workforce,  so  we  not  only  have  to  take  into  account  the  end  result  of  military 
campaigns,  but  also  the  size  of  the  armed  force  needed  to  achieve  the  result. 
Although  an  interesting  topic,  this  issue  is  too  complicated  to  deal  with  in 
the  context  of  this  synthesis  or  even  the  Fighting  for  a  Living  project.  In  this 
context  it  is  perhaps  best  to  see  cost-effectiveness  as  the  lowest  expenditure 
that  would  still  give  a  state  good  prospects  of  success  on  the  battlefield. 

Whatever  the  definition,  it  seems  to  be  the  case  that  courts  and  states  his- 
torically are  looking  for  the  army  that  is  most  effective  on  the  battlefield  at  the 
lowest  possible  cost  (that  even  this  lowest  possible  cost  can  still  be  crippling 
to  state  and  society  alike  is  another  matter).  However,  there  can  be  a  huge 
difference  between  the  immediate  costs  and  the  long-term  financial  burden: 
both  early  seventeenth-century  mercenaries  and  early  twenty-first-century 
contractors  have  been  expensive  in  the  short  run,  but  they  were  and  are  easily 
dismissed  at  the  end  of  the  conflict,  while  standing  state  commission  armies 
were  a  continuous  drain  on  the  treasury  and  the  modern  all-volunteer  forces 
bring  with  them  huge  long-term  obligations  to  the  soldiers  and  their  families. 

The  choice  made  by  different  states  at  different  times  is  influenced  by 
many  more  factors  than  economic  or  financial  ones  alone,  however.  If 
maintaining  a  monopoly  of  violence,  or,  to  put  it  more  realistically,  getting 
as  close  as  it  can  to  a  monopoly  of  violence,  is  a  central  function  of  the  state, 
the  dilemma  faced  by  states  that  create  a  powerful  military  they  may  not 
be  able  to  control,  and  that  may  threaten  the  established  order,  is  a  very 
real  one.  This  is  just  as  true  for  the  state  that  recruits  highly  specialized 
military  experts  (like  the  mamluks  of  the  Middle  East  or  the  Turks  and 
Afghans  of  Hindustan)  as  for  the  one  that,  through  conscription,  recruits 
mass  armies  from  a  population  that  is  at  the  same  time  denied  access  to 
civil  rights  (as  in  the  cases  of  Prussia  and  Russia).  Apart  from  this  kind  of 
political  consideration,  ideological  considerations  or  cultural  prejudices 
may  play  a  part.  The  Ottoman  decision  to  exclude  non-Muslim  citizens 
from  the  conscription  system  (a  decision  that  cost  them  up  to  40  per  cent 
of  their  manpower  pool  before  1878  and  at  least  20  per  cent  thereafter)  is  a 
case  in  point,  but  so  is  the  commitment  to  general  conscription  of  the  late 
nineteenth-century  French  Republic  and  the  Kingdom  of  Italy,  which  was 
informed  by  notions  of  patriotism  and  nation-building.  As  Torn  Leonhard 
shows,  the  rejection  of  conscription  in  Great  Britain  was  influenced  both 
by  the  Whig  interpretation  of  history,  which  saw  large  standing  armies  as 
instruments  of  tyranny  and  essentially  un-British,  and  by  an  idealized  view 
of  the  army  as  representing  traditional  country  values,  with  aristocratic 
officers  and  a  sturdy  peasantry  for  soldiers.  This  shifted  toward  the  end  of 
the  nineteenth  century  with  a  changing  image  of  the  imperial  military  and 


32 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


an  intensified  perception  of  continental  models  of  the  nation-in-arms  -  still 
it  needed  the  new  realities  of  the  First  World  War  to  introduce  general 
conscription  in  Britain. 

Many  states  held  strong  opinions  about  which  populations  produced 
good  soldiers,  and  these  ideas  were  not  without  foundation.  As  Miller 
writes,  one  factor  that  made  soldiering  attractive  for  Scotsmen  and  made 
Scotsmen  attractive  as  soldiers  was  the  long  tradition  in  the  country  of 
military  training  through  the  state-imposed  tradition  of  regular  weapons 
training  shows.  In  addition,  the  internecine  small-scale  warfare  among  the 
Scottish  nobles  and  clans  formed  a  permanent  training  ground  for  future 
soldiers.  The  same  is  true  for  the  Albanians,  who  gained  a  reputation  as 
warriors  both  in  early  modern  Europe  and  in  the  Middle  East.  The  Albanian 
Mehmed  Ali  Pasha  of  Egypt  turned  to  conscripting  the  fellahs  of  the  Nile 
valley  into  his  army  only  when  he  had  no  other  options  left,  partly  because 
the  docile  peasant  population  of  Egypt  was  regarded  as  completely  devoid  of 
martial  qualities.  In  the  end,  it  turned  out  that  with  extreme  coercion  and 
professional  leadership  these  peasants  could  be  made  into  a  very  effective 
army,  but  as  Khaled  Fahmy  shows,  the  population  continued  to  see  military 
service  as  a  kind  of  corvee  and  never  developed  a  "military  ethos".15 

The  exemption  and  substitution  systems  that  were  introduced  into  all 
countries  parallel  to  the  introduction  of  modern  conscription  were  often 
motivated  by  economic  and  ideological  concerns.  On  the  one  hand,  there 
was  the  fear  that  conscripting  the  most  economically  productive  males 
(white-collar  workers,  people  with  education)  would  damage  the  economy, 
as  the  French  debates  charted  by  Hippler  show.  In  the  Kingdom  of  the  Neth- 
erlands even  wage-earners  were  exempted.  On  the  other  hand,  the  tendency 
of  regimes  as  far  apart  as  the  Dutch,  the  Russians,  and  the  Ottomans  to 
exempt  clerical  students  shows  a  concern  with  maintaining  the  ideological 
bases  of  the  social  order.  In  Germany,  Helmuth  von  Moltke  (1800-1891)  feared 
that  the  arming  of  the  workers  would  constitute  a  permanent  danger  for 
the  new  nation-state. 

Universal  patterns 

When  surveying  the  different  case  studies  in  our  project,  we  are  struck  by 
a  number  of  characteristics  that  seem  to  be  almost  universal.  One  is,  as 
noted  before,  that  we  always  see  different  types  of  army  style,  and  different 


15    Fahmy,  All  the  Pasha's  Men,  p.  99. 


INTRODUCTION 


33 


forms  of  recruitment  and  labour  relations,  coexisting.  One  telling  example 
is  that  of  the  Delhi  sultanate  described  by  Kaushik  Roy:  its  army  consisted 
of  mercenaries,  retainers  of  tributary  chieftains,  slave  soldiers,  and  troops 
maintained  by  holders  of  fiefs.  Change  from  one  army  style  to  another 
may  be  sudden,  but  is  rarely  absolute  (the  transition  of  the  US  Army  from 
conscription  to  an  all-volunteer  force  in  1973,  followed  by  similar  transitions 
in  most  NATO  countries,  seems  to  be  the  exception  that  confirms  the  rule). 
While  it  is  true  that  war  nearly  always  brings  with  it  some  degree  of  change, 
the  introduction  of  new  types  of  armed  forces  triggered  by  developments 
in  war  very  often  takes  place  side  by  side  with  the  continued  existence  of 
older  forces,  which  remain  important  even  if  they  are  obsolete  and  have  lost 
their  credibility  on  the  battlefield.  The  Ottomans  kept  their  sipahi  forces 
in  existence  for  at  least  two  centuries  after  their  military  usefulness  had 
ended,  and  the  Chinese  Empire  seems  to  have  been  equally  conservative,  as 
is  shown  by  the  example  of  the  Eight  Banners  of  the  Ch'ing,  who,  according 
to  Christine  Moll-Murata  and  Ulrich  Theobald,  were  militarily  effective 
until  about  1680,  but  were  kept  in  existence  until  1912  and  consumed  about 
a  fifth  of  state  revenues. 

It  is  not  hard  to  see  why.  Military  corps  were,  after  all,  in  an  excellent  posi- 
tion to  defend  their  vested  interests,  especially  when  garrisoned  in  major 
cities  or  the  capital.  This  is  one  reason  why  both  the  Ming  and  the  Ottomans, 
when  they  started  hiring,  or  levying,  mercenary  troops,  left  their  obsolete 
formations  (garrison  troops  and  household  troops  in  the  case  of  the  Ming, 
sipahis  and  janissaries  in  that  of  the  Ottomans)  in  place.  Another,  almost 
inverse  reason,  also  evident  in  both  these  cases,  seems  to  be  that  a  military 
system,  even  when  obsolete  on  the  battlefield,  can  still  be  an  important 
element  of  control  inside  the  country,  not  just  in  terms  of  law  and  order, 
but  also  in  ideological  terms.  Military  elites  often  exemplified  the  existing 
social  order.  The  concept  of  military  households  was  important  to  the  Ming 
as  a  vital  element  in  its  social  order,  just  as  the  concept  of  a  "military  class" 
(askeri)  was  to  that  of  the  Ottomans.  Moll-Murata  and  Theobald,  basing 
themselves  on  the  work  of  Mark  Elliott,  say  that  the  militarily  useless  Eight 
Banners  were  kept  in  being  and  paid  by  the  state  primarily  because  they 
served  "the  display  of  the  presence  of  the  ruling  elite  in  the  capital  and  in 
the  provincial  garrisons."  The  continued  reliance  of  the  French  state  on  its 
nobility  for  the  recruiting  and  officering  of  its  army  even  after  that  nobility 
had  lost  its  autonomy  can  be  interpreted  in  the  same  sense. 

Hereditary  military  labour  has  been  judged  very  differently  in  different 
states  and  societies.  On  the  one  extreme,  we  find  the  Ming  Empire,  which 
originally  imposed  hereditary  military  service  on  a  section  of  the  popula- 


34 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


tion.  On  the  other,  we  find  the  Egyptian  mamluks  and  Ottomans,  who  (at 
least  in  theory)  explicitly  rejected  the  idea  that  sons  should  follow  their 
fathers  in  the  military  profession.  In  both  cases  the  injunction  was  closely 
linked  to  ideas  about  a  stable  social  order,  as  hereditary  service  under  the 
Ming  was  only  one  part  of  a  rigid  division  of  society  into  hereditary  profes- 
sions, while  in  the  Middle  East  exclusion  of  offspring  from  the  military  elite 
was  seen  as  a  way  to  buttress  a  social  order  with  a  military  elite  (askeri) 
that  was  theoretically  completely  separated  from  the  mass  of  the  ruled  in 
a  way  that  is  a  perfect  illustration  of  Ernest  Gellner's  famous  description 
of  the  "agro-literate  polity". 

Apart  from  the  formal  positions  of  states  on  hereditary  service,  for 
or  against,  hereditary  elements  often  played  a  role  in  communities  that 
traditionally  provided  mercenary  soldiers,  such  as  the  Swiss,  the  Scots,  the 
Rajputs,  the  Gurkhas,  or  the  "House  Men"  of  the  Ming.  As  Roy  says  for  India, 
"at  times  military  service  defined  the  identity  of  various  communities". 
Indeed,  in  early  modern  aggregate  contract  armies  in  Europe  children 
often  accompanied  their  fathers  (and  mothers)  on  campaign,  and  being  a 
member  of  a  family  with  military  experience  was  considered  an  advantage. 
Officers  the  world  over  mostly  came  from  "military"  families,  although 
Europe  from  medieval  times  to  the  twentieth  century  seems  to  have  been 
unique  in  the  degree  to  which  performing  military  service  was  considered 
the  noble  occupation  par  excellence  and  a  hallmark  of  noble  status.  The 
Rajputs  display  the  same  characteristics,  but  in  the  Indian  context  their 
case  seems  to  have  been  rather  exceptional. 

What  is  very  clear  is  that  there  is  no  teleological  sequence.  There  is  no 
single  process  of  armies  progressing  from  one  stage  to  another  on  some 
developmental  or  modernization  path.  Because  of  the  strong  ideological 
resistance  in  the  Anglo-Saxon  world  to  the  idea  of  conscription,  which  was 
closely  identified  with  tyranny,  this  system,  which  became  universal  in 
nineteenth-century  Europe,  was  not  introduced  in  Britain  until  a  century 
later  and  then  only  temporarily.  A  century  later  again,  the  reduction  of 
the  armed  forces  of  industrialized  countries  after  the  end  of  the  Cold 
War,  in  combination  with  a  glut  of  arms  and  officers  caused  in  part  by 
the  end  of  the  Warsaw  Pact  and  in  part  by  the  end  of  apartheid  in  South 
Africa,  led  to  a  resurgence  of  mercenary  forces  in  the  form  of  "contractors" 
such  as  Blackwater  as  a  major  component  in  military  campaigns  of  NATO 
countries.  Only  decades  before,  when  mercenaries  played  a  role  only  in 
post-colonial  conflicts  in  Africa,  the  resurgence  of  a  form  of  military  labour 
that  had  been  in  decline  since  the  seventeenth  century  was  not  predicted 
by  anyone.  Nevertheless,  although  there  is  no  single  path  of  development, 


INTRODUCTION 


35 


in  some  periods  certain  systems  clearly  come  to  dominate  while  others 
fade.  As  Lynn  has  noted,  the  mercenary  did  not  disappear  after  1650,  but 
in  Europe  the  state  commission  army  did  become  the  norm.  In  the  Middle 
East  the  janissaries  remained  in  existence  until  1826,  but  irregular  levies 
had  become  the  mainstay  of  the  army  by  the  eighteenth  century.  After  1815, 
many  restoration  regimes,  like  those  in  the  Netherlands  or  Italy,  rejected 
conscription  as  a  revolutionary  legacy,  but  in  the  decades  thereafter  the 
system  became  dominant  throughout  Europe  and  the  Middle  East.  What 
were  the  factors  determining  these  changes? 

Now  let  us  try  to  draw  up  a  preliminary  survey  of  those  factors  that  act 
as  determinants  where  military  employment  is  concerned. 

Manpower  and  money 

The  availability  of  people  and  of  money  seem  to  be  the  most  important 
determinants.  It  is  these  two  factors,  the  classic  factors  of  labour  and  capital, 
that  create  the  parameters  within  which  choices  can  be  made.  In  these 
choices  political,  ideological,  and  cultural  considerations  very  often  play 
a  significant  role. 

Let  us  first  look  at  demographics,  at  manpower.  Both  the  Chinese  and 
Indian  experience  is  determined  first  and  foremost  by  the  availability  of  an 
enormous,  and  seemingly  unlimited,  manpower  pool.  This  gave  the  Mogul 
Empire  the  chance  to  raise  vast  peasant  armies  and  the  Chinese  Empire  the 
opportunity  to  raise  armies  that  were  of  a  different  order  of  magnitude  al- 
together, when  compared  with  European,  South  Asian,  and  Middle  Eastern 
examples.  As  Roy  notes,  at  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century  the  population 
of  the  Indian  subcontinent  was  five  times  that  of  the  Ottoman  Empire, 
ten  times  that  of  France,  and  thirty  times  that  of  England.  The  Chinese 
manpower  pool  was  clearly  unique  when  looked  at  in  a  global  comparative 
perspective,  as  it  was  almost  as  large  as  that  of  the  subcontinent  in  1600 
(and  became  much  bigger  later  on),  but  much  more  of  this  population  fell 
under  the  central  control  of  Beijing  than  was  the  case  in  India.  As  Bailey 
shows,  the  transition  from  a  conscript  army  to  an  all-volunteer  force  in  the 
United  States  was  also  very  much  the  result  of  demographic  development, 
i.e.  the  baby  boom,  which  "translated  into  a  flood  of  young  men  eligible  for 
military  service  in  the  early  1960s".  Scotland  in  the  sixteenth  and  seven- 
teenth centuries  had  a  very  small  population,  but  -  relative  to  its  size  -  an 
abundance  of  surplus  labour  that  was  used  to  handling  weapons.  When 
population  growth  stagnated  in  the  eighteenth  century,  the  recruitment 
of  Scots  by  the  British  Army  became  a  problem.  The  manpower  demands 
of  the  army  in  the  nineteenth  century  meant  that  the  British  had  to  start 


36 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


recruiting  in  the  urban  centres  of  England,  rather  than  in  the  countryside, 
in  spite  of  strong  objections  to  the  enlisting  of  urban  riff-raff  in  the  army. 
For  the  Dutch,  as  Amersfoort  shows,  the  small  population  in  combination 
with  the  drying  up  of  foreign  recruitment  sources  meant  that  a  return  to 
conscription  became  inevitable  after  1813.  This  drying  up  was  due  to  the 
expansion  of  the  textile  industry  in  Switzerland,  which  created  attractive 
alternatives  to  the  traditional  practice  of  hiring  oneself  out  as  a  soldier. 
Conversely,  according  to  Zhao  Zhongnan  and  Suzuki  Tadashi  (cited  by 
David  M.  Robinson  in  this  volume),  the  manpower  pool  available  to  the 
Ming  army  increased  considerably  when  civilian  farmers  and  military 
household  soldiers  lost  their  land  to  increasingly  powerful  landlords  in  the 
late  sixteenth  century,  and  this  allowed  the  state  to  recruit  on  a  large  scale. 

The  second  factor  is  money.  Where  labour  markets  were  tight,  states 
essentially  had  only  two  ways  to  strengthen  their  armies:  either  through 
more  coercion  (isolating  groups  of  people  from  the  labour  market),  which 
also  carries  a  cost,  or  through  improving  the  position  of  the  army  in  the 
labour  market  by  offering  higher  wages  or  other  benefits.  Coercion  is  much 
in  evidence,  and  here  too  we  see  recurrent  patterns  in  a  number  of  cases. 
The  "press",  or  similar  systems,  although  not  used  as  frequently  and  bru- 
tally as  in  the  case  of  the  navy,  was  used  by  British,  German,  and  Ottoman 
authorities  to  get  rid  of  social  undesirables,  which  usually  meant  vagrants, 
beggars,  and  more  generally  men  without  property,  protection,  or  regular 
work.  Miller  gives  a  telling  example  from  1630,  when  the  Privy  Council 
of  Scotland  ordered  "all  beggars,  vagabonds,  and  masterless  men  with  no 
lawful  trade  or  means  of  livelihood"  to  enlist.  In  1769  an  Ottoman  chronicler 
noted  that  provincial  governors  recruited  thieves  and  the  homeless.  In 
Russia,  communities  and  landlords  used  conscription  to  send  off  criminals, 
troublemakers,  drunkards  and  men  deemed  disobedient,  unruly  or  simply 
lazy.  It  is  hardly  surprising  that  armies  time  and  again  complained  about  the 
quality  of  the  personnel  that  was  provided  to  them  in  this  way.  As  Johnson 
shows,  this  meant  that  well-trained  native  troops  in  the  East  India  Company 
Army,  who  were  essentially  volunteers,  were  considered  much  better  than 
the  soldiers  shipped  out  from  the  mother  country. 

Paying  higher  wages  was  a  difficult  option  for  the  state.  Financing  the 
troops  was  a  continuous  problem  for  most  states,  certainly  in  Europe  and 
the  Middle  East.  This  is  true  as  much  for  the  Habsburgs  during  the  Thirty 
Years  War,  who  became  dependent  on  a  new  breed  of  general  contractors 
that  provided  credit  as  well  as  an  army,  as  it  was  for  France  in  the  late 
seventeenth  century  or  the  Ottomans  in  the  nineteenth.  As  Tallett  notes, 
states  such  as  Prussia  in  the  eighteenth  century  -those  which  maintained 


INTRODUCTION 


37 


a  disproportionally  large  army  compared  to  population  size  and  had  under- 
commercialized  economies  -  needed  a  high  degree  of  coercion  to  fill  their 
ranks.  The  Dutch  Republic  was  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  spectrum.  In 
spite  of  its  small  population,  which  was  averse  to  military  service  because 
there  were  more  profitable  opportunities  in  the  labour  market,  the  Dutch 
managed  to  raise  sizeable  aggregate  contract  armies  because  of  their 
financial  strength  and  advanced  banking  system.  The  Chinese  Empire, 
when  united  under  the  Ming  and  Ch'ing  dynasties,  was  at  the  opposite 
side  of  the  spectrum  from  Prussia  in  a  different  way.  Its  huge  population  in 
combination  with  its  ability  to  extract  and  import  such  enormous  amounts 
of  silver  and  grain  that  it  could  provide  for  its  armies  in  spite  of  their  huge 
size  (between  five  and  ten  times  that  of  the  biggest  European  armies) 
meant  that  it  needed  relatively  little  coercion.  Roy  draws  attention  to  the 
fact  that,  because  of  their  huge  manpower  pool,  neither  India  nor  China 
has  ever  had  to  introduce  conscription.  France,  on  the  other  hand,  did. 
After  the  restoration  of  1814,  conscription  was  abolished,  as  it  was  under 
nearly  all  other  restoration  regimes  as  a  detested  revolutionary  legacy, 
but  according  to  Hippler  the  pay  offered  to  soldiers  was  so  low  that  only 
3,500  recruits  came  forward,  and  in  1818  a  form  of  compulsory  military 
service  was  re-established.  Conscription  was  seen  as  a  cheap  alternative 
to  the  pre-revolutionary  state  commission  army  and,  faced  with  the  choice 
between  higher  rewards  to  make  the  army  more  attractive  as  an  employer 
(persuasion)  and  the  imposition  of  a  tributary  labour  relation  (coercion), 
the  French  state  opted  for  the  latter. 

Technology 

As  mentioned  above,  most  states  were  constantly  on  the  lookout  for  the  best 
army  at  the  lowest  cost  to  the  treasury.  But  the  army  had  to  be  effective 
as  well,  which  meant  -  and  means  -  being  technologically  state-of-the-art 
and  reliable.  Many  of  the  most  far-reaching  changes  in  army  recruitment 
and  employment  were  due  to  the  desire  to  apply  lessons  learned  in  war 
(primarily  through  defeat)  and  to  emulate  more  successful  competitors.  As 
Tallett  has  shown,  this  did  not  necessarily  centre  on  new  technologies  (in 
the  sense  of  hardware)  but  more  often  on  that  of  "social  technologies",  things 
such  as  new  forms  of  discipline,  training,  and  institutional  structures.  This 
seems  to  have  been  a  decisive  factor  in  the  long  Austro-Ottoman  wars  of 
the  late  seventeenth  and  early  eighteenth  centuries  as  well  as  in  the  success 
of  relatively  small  European  colonial  forces  all  over  Asia.  Ultimately,  this 
led  to  the  adoption  of  Western-style  discipline,  with  uniforms  and  drill,  in 
Egypt,  the  Ottoman  Empire,  and  China.  That  the  change  was  not  necessarily 


38 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


always  in  the  direction  of  technological  innovation  is  demonstrated  by 
the  case  of  French  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic  armies,  which  replaced 
the  perfectionist  drill  of  the  eighteenth-century  professional  armies  with 
armies  that  were  poorly  trained  and  armed,  but  possessed  overwhelming 
manpower,  speed,  and  high  morale. 

Changes  in  military  technology,  financial  constraints,  and  the  size  of 
the  available  labour  pool  undoubtedly  were  the  most  important  factors 
determining  the  choice  for  a  specific  form  of  recruitment  and  military 
employment,  with  defeat  in  war  acting  as  a  catalyst,  but  other  considera- 
tions also  played  a  role. 

Politics 

Political  considerations  were  always  important,  as  balancing  the  need  for  a 
larger  army  with  the  need  to  maintain  control  over  those  who  could  provide 
it  or  finance  it  (in  the  early  modern  states)  or  the  need  to  manufacture  or 
maintain  consent  among  the  public  (in  modern  states)  has  always  been 
high  on  the  agenda  of  those  in  power.  As  Charles  Tilly  has  argued,  the 
development  of  the  modern  state  rested  on  its  ability  to  offer  protection 
and  the  benefits,  or  rent,  of  that  protection  to  the  interest  groups  that  made 
the  waging  of  war  possible  in  the  first  place.16  The  same  large  modern  army 
that  allowed  a  prince  to  be  successful  in  fighting  external  wars  and  in 
maintaining  a  monopoly  of  violence  at  home  risked  delivering  him  into  the 
hands  of  his  creditors.  High  numbers  of  casualties  or  exorbitant  expendi- 
ture bring  with  them  the  risk  of  loss  of  political  support.  One  of  the  major 
reasons  behind  the  widespread  use  of  contractors  by  the  US  Army  in  Iraq 
and  Afghanistan  has  been  the  way  it  lessens  the  state's  need  to  maintain 
public  support  for  its  policies. 

Ideological  and  cultural factors 

Ideological  and  cultural  factors  determining  who  should  fight  or  should  be 
excluded  from  the  bearing  of  arms  are  also  prominent.  Conscription  was 
so  bound  up  with  the  revolutionary  period  in  the  eyes  of  the  restoration 
regimes  after  1815  that  they  preferred  to  fall  back  on  state  commission 
professional  armies  and  militias  (as  Amersfoort  shows  for  the  Dutch  case), 
while  for  the  French  Third  Republic  conscription  as  an  expression  of  citizen- 
ship and  as  the  supposed  legacy  of  the  great  revolution  became  an  issue 
of  almost  mythical  proportions,  as  Hippler  demonstrates.  As  noted  before, 
the  refusal  of  the  Ottomans  to  conscript  non-Muslims  severely  limited 

16    Tilly,  "War  Making  and  State  Making  as  Organized  Crime". 


INTRODUCTION 


39 


their  manpower  base  until  1909.  Rovinello  highlights  a  problem  that  was 
faced  by  many  states:  while  in  itself  the  Italian  population  after  the  wars  of 
unification  was  more  than  ample  to  fulfil  the  manpower  needs  of  the  army, 
the  Piedmontese  army  command  had  severe  doubts  about  "diluting"  the 
army  with  unreliable  southerners.  The  same  kind  of  doubts  can  be  found 
in  Britain  and  France,  not  so  much  in  terms  of  regional  preferences  but  in 
terms  of  a  distrust  of  the  urban  proletariat,  especially  after  the  Paris  Com- 
mune of  1871.  The  reservations  of  Moltke  in  this  respect  have  been  noted 
already.  The  Ottomans  considered  recruiting  Christians  and  Jews  bad  for 
morale,  and  the  Russians  rejected  Central  Asians  as  unsuitable  until  1916. 

A  change  in  the  dominant  ideological  paradigm  sometimes  exerted  pow- 
erful influence  on  recruitment  practices,  especially  if  it  went  hand  in  hand 
with  economic  or  demographic  change.  It  may  have  been  true  that  sources 
for  mercenary  recruitment  in  Switzerland  dried  up  primarily  because  of 
the  expansion  of  the  textile  industry,  but  it  was  also  true  that  the  spread  of 
enlightenment  ideas  about  citizenship  and  the  nation  made  soldiering  for 
money  a  disreputable  trade.  And,  while  the  baby  boom  certainly  decreased 
the  need  for  forced  conscription  in  the  United  States  in  the  1970s  and  made 
volunteerism  possible,  the  rise  of  neo-liberal  free-market  economists  and 
politicians,  who  defined  conscription  as  a  "hidden  tax"  and  who  advocated 
recruitment  through  the  labour  market,  was  a  decisive  factor  in  forcing 
through  the  transition  to  a  professional  army. 

Popular  cooperation  and  resistance 

The  analysis  thus  far  concentrates  almost  exclusively  on  the  needs  and 
actions  of  the  state,  but  we  should  not,  of  course,  envisage  the  people  who 
were  the  objects  of  the  state's  intervention  as  being  merely  passive;  they  had 
and  have  agency  as  well.  As  much  as  the  state  has  a  repertoire  of  options, 
the  people  also  have  a  repertoire  of  options  open  to  them.  Of  course,  they 
can  comply  with  the  demands  of  the  state,  and  this  may  simply  be  a  form 
of  acquiescence  on  the  part  of  communities  faced  with  the  power  of  the 
state.  On  the  other  hand,  compliance  does  not  necessarily  have  to  equal 
acquiescence.  People  can  see  the  army  as  an  opportunity  structure,  offering 
them  chances  of  social  advancement  or  of  improving  their  living  standards, 
the  chance  to  escape  issues  at  home  including  getting  women  pregnant, 
feuds,  or  crimes  (as  Johnson  notes),  or  simply  the  possibility  to  travel  and 
see  more  of  the  world  than  their  own  village  or  valley.  Rovinello  shows  that 
this  was  a  factor  for  Italian  recruits  in  the  nineteenth  century.  He  also  makes 
the  point  that  the  draft  acquired  a  symbolic  meaning  as  a  rite  of  passage  to 
adulthood.  Being  declared  fit  for  the  army  was  a  "public  certification  of  their 


40 


ERIK-JAN  ZURCHER 


masculinity"  (and,  one  might  add,  of  their  health).  In  the  industrialized  world 
of  the  twentieth  century,  young  healthy  males  who  had  served  their  country 
in  the  army  were  seen  as  attractive  workers,  as  they  had  been  declared 
healthy  (psychologically  as  well  as  physically)  and  had  acquired  discipline. 

The  fact  that  the  state  is  in  need  of  manpower  to  fill  the  ranks  of  its 
army  also  enables  people  to  instrumentalize  military  service  for  their  own 
ends.  Communities  that  provided  soldiers  during  levies  often  managed  to 
get  compensation  in  the  form  of  tax  breaks.  The  Cossacks  of  the  Russian 
Empire  are  perhaps  the  most  telling  example  of  a  community  that  managed 
to  exchange  its  loyalty  and  military  prowess  for  concessions  in  the  form  of 
autonomy,  royal  protection,  and  tax  exemption.  Another  interesting  form 
of  "exchange"  is  the  one  that  Bes.ikc.i  describes  for  the  Ottoman  Empire  in 
the  First  World  War,  when  prisoners  were  released  in  large  numbers  if  they 
agreed  to  serve  in  labour  battalions  or  in  militia  units. 

There  is  evidence  that,  whether  in  Asia,  the  Middle  East,  or  Europe,  the 
army  was  rarely  a  popular  employer,  at  least  where  the  rank  and  file  were 
concerned.  It  was  often  an  employer  of  last  resort.  But  even  so,  when  work 
was  scarce,  when  harvests  failed,  or  when  industries  went  through  a  slump, 
the  army  offered  low  but  regular  pay,  food,  and  lodging  -  in  other  words  a 
security  that  was  hard  to  find  anywhere  else. 

On  the  other  hand,  people  may  also  resist.  But,  to  borrow  from  Charles 
Tilly's  conceptualization  of  social  movements,17  the  repertoire  of  resistance 
is  also  varied.  First  there  is  the  tendency  to  avoid  service  altogether.  Con- 
scription systems,  old  and  new,  just  like  enslavement,  have  generally  been 
deeply  unpopular.  As  Besikci  says  (citing  Alan  Forrest),  "conscription  can 
also  be  depicted  as  a  battleground  between  individual  and  local  communi- 
ties on  the  one  hand  and  a  distant  impersonal  state  on  the  other".  Privileged 
sections  of  society  have  generally  been  able  to  make  use  of  exemptions,  and 
both  communities  and  local  authorities  seem  to  have  done  their  best  to 
make  sure  that  "undesirables",  who  were  unproductive  and  might  otherwise 
create  unrest  in  society,  were  taken  into  the  army.  This  is  a  clear  case  of 
instrumentalization  of  the  state's  recruitment  drive  on  the  part  of  social 
actors.  For  populations  that  were  faced  with  coercion  on  the  part  of  the 
state  and  its  representatives,  different  forms  of  avoidance  were  open:  going 
into  hiding  or  self-mutilation,  which,  according  to  Fahmy,  was  especially 
widespread  in  nineteenth-century  Egypt.18  Once  in  the  army,  both  desertion 
and  defection  became  options,  even  if  sometimes  highly  dangerous  ones. 

17  Tilly,  Social  Movements  7768-2004. 

18  Fahmy,  All  the  Pasha's  Men,  pp.  260-263. 


INTRODUCTION 


41 


The  ultimate  form  of  resistance  was  mutiny.  "Industrial  action"  by  its  own 
armed  forces  was  of  course  the  most  serious  crisis  any  ruling  elite  could 
face.  There  seems  to  be  some  evidence  that  groups  with  a  strong  corporate 
identity  that  could  be  regarded  as  "artisans  of  war"  such  as  mercenaries 
or  janissaries,  and  troops  raised  from  an  urban  background,  seem  to  be 
more  prone  to  mutiny  while,  on  the  other  hand,  peasant  armies  seem  to 
be  more  prone  to  desertion.  This  may  well  be  linked,  as  Sikora  suggests,  to 
the  fact  that  peasant  armies,  whether  early  modern  state  commissioned 
armies  or  conscripted  ones,  were  subjected  to  stronger  coercion,  control, 
and  discipline  from  the  late  seventeenth  century  onwards.  It  may  also  be 
linked,  I  would  suggest,  to  the  different  repertoires  of  resistance  in  towns 
and  in  the  countryside.  To  an  urban  population,  industrial  action  and  collec- 
tive protest  were  familiar,  even  before  the  advent  of  industrialization,  while 
traditionally  desertion  -  that  is,  fleeing  the  land  and  going  into  hiding  -  had 
been  a  form  of  resistance  to  the  demands  of  the  state  and  the  landowning 
class  in  many  rural  societies. 


A  final  word 

What  the  project  has  shown  us  is  that  there  is,  to  paraphrase  van  der  Linden, 
an  almost  endless  variety  of  military  workers  in  history,  but  also  that  we  can 
develop  a  taxonomy  that  allows  us  to  group  all  these  different  forms  from 
many  different  countries  and  periods  in  categories  on  the  basis  of  shared 
characteristics  and  to  do  so  in  a  meaningful  way.  When  we  combine  the 
classification  thus  achieved  with  a  set  of  the  most  important  determinants, 
we  can  discern  a  number  of  patterns  and  reach  tentative  conclusions  about 
the  circumstances  that  influence  the  choice  for  a  certain  type  of  recruit- 
ment and  a  certain  form  of  military  employment.  It  is  hoped  that,  alongside 
similar  research  conducted  at  the  IISH  on  industries  that  offer  opportunities 
for  comparative  research  because  of  their  global  nature  (textiles,  docks, 
prostitution),  this  study  of  military  labour  helps  us  to  increase  our  under- 
standing of  labour  relations  worldwide.19 


19  In  writing  this  synthesis  I  have  profited  from  the  comments  and  suggestions  of  the  col- 
leagues who  participated  in  the  project  and  of  Jan  Lucassen  and  Marcel  van  der  Linden.  My 
special  thanks  go  to  Elise  Kimerling  Wirtschafter  for  kindly  correcting  the  English  of  the  original 
text. 


Military  labor  in  China,  c.  1500 

David  M.  Robinson 


Military  labor  markets  have  a  long  history  in  China.  In  fact,  as  Mark  Lewis 
has  shown,  policy  debates  over  such  issues  as  conscription,  professional 
standing  armies,  recruitment,  and  rewards  predated  the  emergence  of  the 
first  imperial  dynasty,  the  Qin,  in  221 BC.1  Given  this  background,  modern 
scholars'  relative  indifference  to  this  cluster  of  issues  is  striking.  This  chap- 
ter briefly  reviews  a  few  key  works  and  debates  related  to  military  labor  in 
China  c.  1500,  most  especially  recruitment,  then  moves  to  consideration 
of  the  Chinese  example  in  the  light  of  our  common  comparative  axes  and 
taxonomies,  and  finally  concludes  with  an  effort  to  assess  the  causal  factors 
that  accounted  for  the  particular  forms  of  military  labor  in  China  c.  1500. 

A  review  of  the  field 

In  1937,  a  pioneering  scholar  of  the  Ming  period  (1368-1644),  Wu  Han,  wrote 
the  first  major  scholarly  essay  on  the  Ming  military.  His  central  concern  was 
the  transition  from  what  he  described  as  a  hereditary  conscription  military, 
tightly  controlled  by  the  central  government,  to  a  system  of  hired  soldiers 
that  ultimately  gave  greater  power  to  leading  generals  than  to  the  dynasty. 
Wu  described  the  transformation  in  the  following  terms: 

From  a  garrison  system  that  supported  3  million  men  at  the  cost  of 
not  a  single  penny  to  the  state  to  a  mercenary  system  whose  costs 
fell  entirely  to  the  people  and  dynastic  coffers;  from  garrison  troops 
with  fixed  levels  of  men  to  mercenaries  with  no  fixed  numbers;  from 
hereditary  garrison  troops  to  hired  mercenaries:  this  sea  change  was 
central  to  the  rise  and  fall  of  the  Ming  period  and  was  the  largest  shift 
in  modern  history.2 

Before  examining  Wu  Han's  arguments,  a  thumbnail  sketch  of  the  Ming 
military  system  is  useful  here.  Borrowing  a  model  developed  by  his  prede- 
cessors (the  Mongol  rulers  of  the  Yuan  dynasty,  who  had  controlled  China 

1  Lewis,  Sanctioned  Violence  in  Early  China,  esp.  ch.  2,  "The  Warring  State",  pp.  53-96. 

2  Wu,  "Mingdai  de  jun  bing",  p.  149. 


44 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


for  much  of  the  thirteenth  and  fourteenth  centuries),  the  Ming  founder,  Zhu 
Yuanzhang  (1328-1398),  had  assigned  hereditary  obligations  to  the  state  to 
individual  households.3  He  divided  the  population  into  dozens  of  categories 
-  saltern  households,  mining  households,  and  farming  households,  to  name 
just  a  few.4  Military  households  were  among  the  largest  of  such  categories. 
The  Ming  founder  drew  upon  four  major  sources  of  troops  for  his  dynastic 
army:  (a)  men  who  had  joined  him  when  he  had  been  a  rebel  leader  during 
the  1350s  and  early  1360s,  (b)  surrendering  troops  of  rival  warlords  who 
were  integrated  into  his  army,  (c)  criminals  sentenced  to  military  service, 
and  finally  (d)  forced  conscripts,  usually  assessed  as  a  given  percentage  of 
the  local  population  and  used  to  fill  out  the  ranks  of  the  early  Ming  army.5 

The  imperial  army  in  general  and  military  households  in  particular 
were  intended  to  be  self-replicating  and  self-supporting.  Each  household 
was  responsible  for  providing  one  active  service  member  to  the  state  at  all 
times  instead  of  the  standard  corvee  and/or  tax  obligations  rendered  by 
other  subjects.  Further  they  were  to  supply  one,  two,  or  three  other  males 
whose  labor  and/or  income  was  to  support  the  active-service  soldier.  If 
through  death,  accident,  desertion,  or  dismissal,  the  active-service  soldier 
was  no  longer  able  to  fulfill  his  responsibilities  to  the  state,  the  family  was 
to  supply  a  replacement,  beginning  with  the  nuclear  family  and  extending 
out  to  brothers,  cousins,  and  beyond.6  By  the  late  fourteenth  century,  active- 
service  soldiers  were  stationed  in  more  than  three  hundred  garrisons  spread 
across  the  empire.  The  economic  foundation  of  this  hereditary  garrison 
system,  like  the  foundation  for  the  dynasty  as  a  whole,  was  agriculture. 

During  the  early  decades  of  the  Ming,  the  central  government  seized 
huge  swathes  of  territory  that  were  turned  over  to  garrisons,  which  were 
responsible  for  opening  and  working  agricultural  lands.  The  primary  duty 
of  approximately  70  per  cent  of  the  entire  1.2  million-man  Ming  army  (but 
rising  briefly  to  a  reputed  3  million  in  the  early  fifteenth  century)  was 
raising  grains,  half  of  which  were  to  be  used  by  the  farmer-soldiers  and  half 
to  be  turned  over  to  the  local  garrison  to  cover  expenses  for  active-service 


3  Taylor,  "Yuan  Origins  of  the  Wei-so  System". 

4  Wang,  "Some  Salient  Features  of  the  Ming  Labor  Service  System". 

5  For  a  recent  review,  see  Zhang,  Mingdaiweisuo  junhuyanjiu,  pp.  20-50.  Another  essential 
set  of  essays  by  a  leading  scholar  of  the  social  and  institutional  histories  of  the  Ming  garrisons 
isYu,  Weisuo,junhu,yujunyi. 

6  Yu,  Mingdaijunhu  shixi  zhidu. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


45 


troops  such  as  wages,  equipment,  medical  costs,  and  clothing.7  This  was 
Wu  Han's  self-sufficient  and  well-controlled  garrison  system.8 

For  Wu  and  many  later  scholars,  the  shift  to  hired  troops  grew  out  of 
official  corruption  and  exploitation.9  Underpaid  and  exploited  by  their 
officers,  by  early  in  the  fifteenth  century  garrison  soldiers  began  to  desert  in 
large  numbers.  Desertion  undermined  not  only  troop  strength  but  also  the 
economic  foundation  of  the  system,  as  fewer  and  fewer  men  were  available 
to  farm  the  garrison  fields.  Other  soldiers  offered  gifts  and  monthly  fees  to 
their  superiors  to  avoid  military  duties.  Efforts  to  track  down  deserters  or 
replace  them  with  family  members,  who  might  live  corvee-free  and  far  away, 
led  to  further  opportunities  for  graft.  Bribes  were  demanded  to  turn  a  blind 
eye.  Authorities  responsible  for  filling  the  ranks  were  not  above  arbitrarily 
registering  unrelated  or  unqualified  men  to  serve  as  replacements.  From 
the  early  decades  of  the  dynasty,  the  central  government  responded  with 
orders  for  local  authorities  to  compile  more  accurate  registers,  eliminate 
fraud,  and  locate  replacements  from  the  families  of  soldiers  who  deserted.10 
In  his  famous  "Placards  to  Instruct  the  People"  issued  in  1398,  the  Ming 
founder  repeatedly  urged  members  of  rural  communities  to  turn  in  desert- 
ing soldiers  who  sought  to  hide  from  imperial  authority.11  The  results  were 
mixed  at  best. 

Another  complaint  heard  with  increasing  frequency  over  the  fifteenth 
century  was  the  misuse  of  military  personnel.  Officers  often  treated 
soldiers  in  their  units  as  private  labor  gangs:  they  tilled  officers'  fields, 
tended  livestock,  felled  trees  for  lumber,  gathered  valuable  roots  such  as 
ginseng  (along  the  northeastern  border),  conducted  trade,  and  acted  as 
personal  servants.  In  fact,  the  central  government  and  its  agents  also  used 
the  army  for  nonmilitary  purposes  but  on  a  much  grander  scale.  Garrison 
soldiers  provided  the  labor  for  many  if  not  most  large-scale  construction 


7  Wang,  Mingdai  de juntian;  Ming,  "Tuntian  Farming  of  the  Ming  Dynasty". 

8  Even  during  the  early  years  of  the  dynasty,  the  military  system  had  never  been  economically 
self-sufficient  but  instead  relied  on  regular  infusions  of  "gifts"  from  the  throne.  See  Huang, 
"Military  Expenditures  in  Sixteenth- Century  Ming  China". 

9  For  a  fairly  recent  essay  that  ascribes  manpower  shortages  -  and  the  dynasty's  ultimate 
collapse  -  primarily  to  corruption  among  military  officers  and  other  administrators,  see  Liu, 
"Mingdai  weisuo  quewu  de  yuanyin  tanxi".  Liu  explicitly  argues  that  the  dangers  of  corruption 
in  the  Ming  have  lessons  for  contemporary  leaders  in  China.  The  same  line  of  argumentation 
of  course  was  true  for  Wu  Han  writing  in  the  1930s;  he  was  criticizing  the  practices  of  the 
Guomintang  (or  Nationalist)  government  under  Chiang  Kai-shek. 

10  Ma,  "Mingdai  de  jiading".  For  an  early  example  of  desertion,  see  Ming  Taizu  shUu,  ig3.8a-b. 

11  Zhu,  "The  Placards  of  the  People's  Instructions". 


46 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


projects  sponsored  by  the  state,  including  palaces,  city  walls,  dikes,  border 
fortifications,  and  even  stupas  for  Tibetan  monks  resident  in  the  capital.12 

The  Ming  was  the  first  Chinese  dynasty  to  institutionalize  the  use  of 
military  personnel  as  transport  workers  on  a  permanent  and  wide-scale 
basis.  During  the  late  fourteenth  century,  more  than  80,000  soldiers  were 
used  to  transport  grain  to  the  distant  but  strategically  vital  northeast  border 
region  of  Liaodong.13  Early  in  the  fifteenth  century,  the  principal  dynastic 
capital  was  relocated  northward  from  Nanjing  to  Beijing.  From  this  time 
onward,  an  even  greater  number  of  men  moved  tax  grain  along  the  Grand 
Canal  to  the  capital  in  Beijing  from  agricultural  centres  in  the  southeast. 
Figures  from  the  first  half  of  the  fifteenth  century  suggest  that  each  year 
more  than  100,000  men  drawn  from  approximately  170  garrisons  moved  3 
million  piculs  of  rice  in  3,000  barges  along  the  Grand  Canal  system  from 
Ningbo  to  the  capital,  a  distance  of  approximately  2,300  km.14  However,  the 
military  labor  pool  that  supported  the  arrangement  on  occasion  proved  too 
tempting  to  the  court.  For  instance,  in  1448  nearly  20,000  grain-shipment 
soldiers  were  deployed  elsewhere  to  suppress  a  major  insurrection,  severely 
disrupting  the  delivery  of  the  grain  to  the  capital.  This  in  turn  strained 
dynastic  logistics  -  the  approximately  700,000  imperial  troops  stationed 
in  Beijing  and  its  environs  depended  on  the  timely  arrival  of  tax  grain  from 
the  productive  southern  provinces. 

The  disruption  catalyzed  reform  in  the  late  fifteenth  century  that  re- 
sulted, on  paper  at  least,  in  an  even  more  ambitious  program  to  ship  grain 
along  the  Grand  Canal:  121,500  soldiers  moving  grain  on  11,775  transport 
barges.  The  state  permitted  each  grain-shipment  soldier  to  carry  items  to 
engage  in  a  limited  amount  of  customs-free  trade.  The  state  also  built  and 
maintained  a  series  of  hostels  and  pharmacies  along  the  Grand  Canal  for 
transport  soldiers.  The  result  was  a  stable  and  expanded  flow  of  grain.  By 
1500  or  so,  approximately  4  million  piculs  of  grain  arrived  in  the  capital  each 
year.15  Court  officials  congratulated  themselves  on  their  success,  putting 
in  the  mouths  of  a  foreign  envoy  who  traveled  the  Grand  Canal  to  the 
capital  the  following  testimony:  "The  rudders  of  the  Central  State  are  more 
numerous  than  the  soldiers  of  this  small  barbarian  kingdom.  Would  we 
dare  harbor  traitorous  aspirations?"16 

12  For  the  staggering  costs  of  building  of  the  Ming's  northern  fortifications,  see  Waldron,  The 
Great  Wall  of  China,  pp.  91-164. 

13  Ming  Taizu  shilu,  193.58-0. 

14  Lin,  "Mingdai  caojunzhi  chutan",  p.  183. 

15  Ibid.,  pp.  183-187. 

16  "Xu"  in  Cao  chuan  zhijuan  6,  cited  in  Lin,  "Mingdai  caojunzhi  chutan",  p.  187. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


47 


For  Wu  Han  and  others,  however,  the  state's  use  of  military  personnel  in 
major  infrastructure  projects  and  for  other  purposes  not  only  drove  many 
to  desertion  but  also  undermined  military  training.  The  young  and  the 
strong  were  favored  for  such  labor  gangs.  The  old  and  infirm  were  most 
available  but  least  likely  to  benefit  from  regular  military  drill.  According 
to  this  line  of  analysis,  by  no  later  than  the  1430s,  the  armies  of  the  Ming 
dynasty  were  in  steep  decline.  A  disastrous  defeat  in  1449  at  the  hands  of 
the  Mongol  leader  Esen  at  Tumu  Fort  (north  of  the  capital  at  Beijing)  is  often 
offered  as  evidence  for  this  collapse.17 

The  debacle  at  Tumu  represented  a  major  crisis  for  the  Ming  dynasty.  The 
reigning  emperor  was  taken  captive;  his  half-brother  was  hurriedly  put  on 
the  throne  in  his  place;  the  survival  of  the  dynasty,  especially  the  capital 
in  Beijing,  seemed  uncertain.  To  revitalize  the  military,  the  Ming  court 
enacted  several  reforms,  two  of  which  are  most  critical  to  our  interests. 
The  first  was  the  augmentation  of  garrison  troops  through  local  militias. 
The  second  was  the  first  large-scale  effort  to  hire  troops.  In  1449  the  central 
government  instructed  local  officials  to  conscript  between  one  and  four 
men  from  each  administrative  community  (which  putatively  contained 
110  families).  These  men  were  to  drill  several  weeks  each  fall  and  spring 
during  lulls  in  the  farming  calendar.  These  local  militias  (literally  "people's 
stalwarts")  were  intended  for  short-term  defense  of  their  localities.  When 
called  up  for  service,  each  man  was  to  be  provided  with  "travel  grain",  i.e., 
a  wage  to  feed  him  while  on  campaign. 

The  second  effort  to  augment  the  garrison  system  during  the  fifteenth 
century  was  the  initial  and  limited  use  of  hired  troops.  The  Ming  imperial 
state  employed  a  range  of  recruiting  methods:  it  recruited  men  from  within 
the  ranks  of  garrison  soldiers,  that  is,  men  from  hereditary  military  house- 
holds who  were  already  legally  bound  to  fulfill  their  family's  obligations 
to  the  state;  it  recruited  members  of  hereditary  military  households  who 
were  not  actively  serving  as  soldiers  but  who  were  supposed  to  provide 
income  to  support  their  active-service  relative;  and  it  recruited  those  with 
no  military  obligations  to  the  state.  In  each  case,  recruits  generally  received 
signing  bonuses  and  monthly  salaries.  Later,  during  the  widespread  coastal 
piracy  of  the  mid-sixteenth  century,  many  generals  actively  recruited  hired 
troops,  offering  competitive  wages  and  intensive  training  in  weapons  and 
group  combat. 

Hired  troops  were  especially  numerous  along  the  northern  border.  Al- 
ready by  1500  or  so,  nearly  20,000  hired  troops  augmented  dynastic  defense 


17    Mote,  "The  T'u-mu  Incident  of  1449". 


48 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


in  the  single  northwestern  region  of  Yansui.18  By  1550,  officials  were  recruit- 
ing on  a  large  scale.  In  the  wake  of  destructive  raiding  in  the  capital  region 
by  the  Mongol  leader  Altan  in  1550,  recruiting  in  several  northern  provinces 
yielded  as  many  as  40,000  men  in  the  single  year  of  1550.  Wu  Han  argued 
that,  by  this  point,  hired  troops  had  become  the  principal  fighting  forces 
of  the  Ming  military  -  not  in  terms  of  numbers  but  in  terms  of  efficacy. 
Garrison  troops  were  not  abolished  but  neither  did  they  contribute  greatly 
to  the  defense  of  the  dynasty.19  As  noted  above,  however,  the  state  put  them 
to  use  in  a  variety  of  ways. 

For  Wu  Han  and  others,  corruption  again  eroded  whatever  military 
advantages  the  hired  troops  offered.  Part  of  the  problem  was  that  men 
signed  up,  received  their  bonuses,  and  fled  as  soon  as  possible.  Officials  at 
the  time  claimed  that  some  men  did  this  on  a  serial  basis.  At  the  same  time, 
hired  troops  expected  to  be  paid  on  time  and  did  not  hesitate  to  riot  when 
the  state  failed  to  fulfill  its  obligations.  As  the  dynasty's  fiscal  conditions 
worsened  in  the  early  seventeenth  century,  wages  were  frequently  in  ar- 
rears. Wu  Han  estimated  that,  between  1610  and  1627,  wages  to  hired  troops 
were  in  arrears  by  nearly  10  million  taels  of  silver  (although  it  is  not  clear  if 
they  were  being  paid  in  grain,  silver,  or  a  mix  of  the  two).20  To  put  this  figure 
in  perspective,  the  average  annual  income  of  the  central  government  was 
somewhere  in  the  neighborhood  of  30  million  taels  of  silver. 

Overall,  the  system  of  hiring  troops  contributed  to  higher  costs  for 
military  defense,  especially  along  the  northern  border.  In  the  mid-fifteenth 
century,  the  central  government  began  to  provide  "annual  subsidies"  to 
garrisons  to  support  the  growing  expenses  of  the  northern  border.  By  the 
early  sixteenth  century,  such  subsidies  reached  430,000  taels  and  continued 
to  rise  steadily  until  the  end  of  the  dynasty.  To  cover  the  higher  costs,  court 
and  local  government  levied  surtaxes,  sometimes  years  or  even  decades  in 
advance,  which  according  to  Wu  Han  and  others,  in  turn  increased  land 
flight,  social  discontent,  and  support  for  the  rebels  who  eventually  toppled 
the  dynasty.  During  the  last  reign  of  the  dynasty  (1628-1644),  these  surtaxes 
amounted  to  nearly  30  million  taels  of  silver.21 

Finally,  on  the  political  and  social  fronts,  a  common  perception  at  the 
time  and  in  much  modern  scholarship  is  that,  by  the  early  seventeenth 
century,  hired  soldiers  felt  greater  loyalty  to  their  individual  commanders 

18  Li,  "Mingdai  mubingzhi  jianlun",  p.  64. 

19  Wu,  "Mingdai  de  jun  bing",  p.  188. 

20  Ibid.,  p.  197. 

21  Li,  "Mingdai  mubingzhi  jianlun",  p.  68. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


49 


than  they  did  to  the  court  or  central  government.  In  a  similar  vein,  the 
most  powerful  generals,  who  considered  their  troops  as  a  source  of  personal 
power,  were  loath  to  waste  them  in  combat  with  the  court's  enemies.  Wu 
Han  argued  that  during  the  dynasty's  last  decades,  these  generals  were 
unwilling  to  fully  engage  with  rebel  forces,  which  led  directly  to  the  fall 
of  the  Ming.22 

Other,  less  well-known  scholars  have  characterized  the  growth  in  hired 
soldiers  in  different  ways.  In  1940,  the  Japanese  scholar  Suzuki  Tadashi 
examined  the  emergence  and  significance  of  "people's  stalwarts"  and  hired 
soldiers  during  the  Ming.23  Like  Wu,  Suzuki  contextualized  the  appearance 
of  the  people's  stalwarts  as  a  response  to  the  decline  of  the  garrison  system, 
a  decline  thrown  into  clear  relief  with  the  1449  Tumu  debacle.  Suzuki, 
however,  pointed  to  the  great  regional  variation  in  the  size  and  function 
of  people's  stalwarts.  He  also  viewed  the  people's  stalwarts  as  a  facet  of 
longstanding  traditions  of  local  self-governance,  a  characterization  fully 
congruent  with  Japanese  Sinology  of  the  first  half  of  the  twentieth  century.24 
Thus,  where  Wu  Han  had  written  chiefly  from  the  perspective  of  the  central 
government's  efforts  to  revive  the  dynasty's  military,  Suzuki  more  fully 
acknowledged  the  role  of  local  government  and  local  elites. 

Suzuki's  understanding  of  mercenaries,  too,  differed  from  that  of  Wu 
Han.  Although  both  argued  that  the  widespread  use  of  hired  soldiers  dated 
from  the  piracy  crises  of  the  mid-sixteenth  century,  Suzuki  held  that  hired 
soldiers,  particularly  jia  bing  and  jia  ding,  which  might  be  translated  as 
"house  soldiers"  and  "housemen",  respectively,  not  only  bolstered  impe- 
rial military  strength  but  also  enjoyed  considerable  appeal  among  the 
general  populace.  He  offered  numerous  examples  of  where  contemporary 
observers  portrayed  carefully  selected  housemen  as  the  key  to  success  in 
battle.  Enjoying  preferential  economic  treatment  and  holding  some  level 
of  personal  loyalty  to  an  individual  commander,  housemen  were  thought 
most  effective  as  shock  troops  or  as  vanguard  forces.  Whereas  duty  as  a 
people's  stalwart  was  an  onerous  obligation,  to  be  evaded  if  at  all  possible, 
service  as  a  houseman  was  an  opportunity  to  earn  cash  and  a  means  of 
escape  from  a  village  economy  that  had  suffered  considerable  damage  as 

22  Wu,  "Mingdai  de  jun  bing",  p.  190.  More  recently,  Kenneth  Swope  has  similarly  observed, 
"the  military  families  in  Liaodong  came  to  form  a  martial  caste  of  sorts,  largely  independent 
from  central  government  control"  (Swope,  "A  Few  Good  Men",  pp.  40-41).  Swope,  however,  offers 
a  far  more  positive  treatment  of  the  contribution  of  the  leading  military  families  of  Liaodong 
to  dynastic  defenses. 

23  Suzuki,  "Mingdai  kahei  ko". 

24  Ibid.,  pp.  7-10,  24. 


50 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


a  result  of  piracy  and  efforts  to  suppress  it.  Thus,  large  numbers  of  young 
men  were  willing  to  fight  for  pay.25  Although  Suzuki  too  acknowledged  that 
their  growing  ranks  imposed  a  serious  fiscal  strain  on  the  dynasty  in  the 
long  term,  he  argued  that  hired  soldiers  were  militarily  effective. 

Finally,  Suzuki  disagreed  with  Wu  about  the  challenge  that  late  Ming 
commanders  posed  to  the  central  government.  He  acknowledged  that 
border  generals  did  have  the  potential  to  become  "minor  warlords",  but  he 
maintained  that  fighting  with  the  Manchus  prevented  them  from  develop- 
ing into  a  serious  threat  to  Beijing.  If  the  Qing  had  failed  and  these  Ming 
border  commanders  had  continued  to  grow  in  power,  however,  they  would 
have  emerged  as  warlords  and  brought  "a  revolution"  similar  to  those  that 
had  ended  many  previous  dynasties,  Suzuki  speculated.26 

In  1952,  Suzuki  published  an  additional  study  that  focused  more  squarely 
on  the  socioeconomic  conditions  that  gave  rise  to  the  "housemen".27  Suzuki 
saw  the  housemen  as  part  of  a  widespread  desire  for  social  advancement 
that  predated  the  sixteenth  century.  Its  background  was  the  monetization 
of  the  economy,  including  the  payment  of  some  taxes  in  silver,  improved 
standards  of  living,  and  changed  attitudes  toward  the  acquisition  of 
wealth.28  Self-castration  in  the  hope  of  securing  employment  in  the  imperial 
palace  and  "placing  oneself  in  the  care  of  the  powerful"  (tou  chong)  were 
simply  different  manifestations  of  this  same  desire  to  advance,  he  wrote.  He 
characterized  housemen  as  sharing  certain  similarities  with  the  long-term 
tenants  of  landlords  in  that  they  were  sometimes  cast  as  sharing  fictive  kin 
ties  with  their  patrons.  Suzuki  described  the  housemen  as  simultaneously 
"trusted  intimates,  claws  and  teeth,  and  hawks  and  hounds".  He  empha- 
sized, however,  that  the  sources  for  military  housemen  were  by  no  means 
restricted  to  household  servants. 

Suzuki  stressed  not  only  the  push/pull  factor  of  the  new  opportunities.  He 
also  maintained  that  the  supply  of  potential  housemen  had  its  roots  in  the 
intersection  of  land  tenure  patterns  and  strong  state  influence  prevalent  in 
North  China,  especially  in  the  borderlands.  During  the  fifteenth  and  early 
sixteenth  centuries,  military  commanders,  palace  eunuchs,  and  imperial 
affines  used  their  influence  to  encroach  upon  relatively  plentiful  farmlands 
that  enjoyed  tax-free  status  (whether  because  they  were  garrison  fields, 
imperial  horse  pasturages,  or  acreage  opened  up  under  special  government 

25  Ibid.,  pp.  17-22,  25. 

26  Ibid.,  pp.  23-24. 

27  Suzuki,  "Mindai  katei  ko". 

28  Ibid.,  p.  27. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


51 


incentives).  As  a  result,  the  tax  burden  for  the  village  or  county  as  a  whole 
fell  heavily  on  those  who  remained  in  the  rolls.  In  response,  many  placed 
themselves  under  the  protection  of  powerful  patrons.  Farming  households 
provided  the  labor  to  work  the  fields  and  tend  livestock;  they  also  paid  rent 
to  their  patrons.  The  patrons  in  turn  used  their  political  connections  to 
shield  them  from  tax  and  labor  obligations  to  the  state  and,  perhaps  even 
more  importantly,  from  extra-legal  levies  that  local  officials  imposed  with 
great  frequency.29  Later  scholars,  such  as  Ray  Huang  and  Wang  Yuquan, 
would  debate  whether  this  arrangement  represented  a  form  of  political 
and  economic  exploitation  by  elites  that  reduced  hapless  peasants  to  the 
status  of  serfs  or  an  economically  beneficial  accord  that  allowed  farmers  to 
keep  more  of  the  harvest  for  themselves  and  avoid  arbitrary  exactions  from 
local  officials.30  In  any  case,  for  Suzuki  the  basic  equation  was  clear  -  the 
more  land  that  military  commanders  controlled,  the  greater  their  ability  to 
support  housemen,  which  in  turn  increased  their  ability  to  extract  rewards, 
honors,  and  special  privileges  from  the  court. 

Although  it  is  common  to  date  the  widespread  use  of  housemen  to  the 
mid-sixteenth  century,  Suzuki  pointed  out  that,  by  no  later  than  the  mid- 
fifteenth  century,  some  military  commanders  maintained  housemen  on 
whose  behalf  they  tried  to  secure  rewards  from  the  throne  for  battlefield 
exploits.31  By  the  mid-sixteenth  century,  the  central  government  was  issuing 
orders  for  commanders  to  recruit  housemen  (again  along  the  northern 
border).32  During  the  late  sixteenth  and  mid-seventeenth  centuries,  house- 
men grew  even  more  prominent  in  contemporary  consciousness. 

Many  writers  at  the  time  felt  that  housemen  demonstrated  superior 
valor  on  the  battlefield.  Border  commanders  were  often  careful  to  cultivate 
personal  ties  with  their  housemen,  "sharing  equally  their  joys  and  hard- 
ships". Some  housemen  adopted  the  surname  of  their  commander.  In  other 
cases,  the  housemen  were  bound  through  adoption  or  marriage  ties  to 
their  commanders.33  Thus,  it  was  felt,  housemen  soldiers  were  uniquely 

29  Ibid.,  pp.  27-32. 

30  Huang,  Taxation  and  Government  Finance  in  Sixteenth-Century  China,  pp.  107,  325-326; 
Wang,  "Mingdai  xungui  dizhu  de  dianhu".  For  a  summary  of  the  question  and  references  to 
related  Chinese  and  Japanese  scholarship,  see  Robinson,  Bandits,  Eunuchs,  and  the  Son  of  Heaven, 
PP-  36-37- 

31  Ma,  "Mingdai  de  jiading",  pp.  214-218. 

32  Ibid.,  pp.  222-223. 

33  These  familial  ties  are  especially  stressed  by  Zhao  ("Lun  Mingdai  jundui  zhong  jiading  de 
tedian  yu  diwei",  p.  146),  who  argues  that  the  prevalence  of  adoption  within  the  ranks  of  the 
military  surpassed  that  of  any  earlier  period  in  Chinese  history. 


52 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


cohesive  as  units  and  willing  to  endure  great  suffering  on  behalf  of  their 
commanders.  Commanders  used  units  of  housemen  that  might  number 
in  the  hundreds  to  anchor  much  larger  and  less  committed  forces.  Such 
bands  of  housemen  sometimes  appear  in  contemporary  records  as  "death 
soldiers"  (sishi)  or  "dare-to-die  soldiers"  (gansishi)  because  of  their  reputed 
willingness  to  sacrifice  their  lives  on  behalf  of  their  commander.  Despite 
these  strong  ties  of  personal  loyalty,  as  noted  above,  Suzuki  maintained 
that  both  commanders  and  housemen  remained  under  state  control  and 
did  not  pose  a  serious  threat  to  the  dynasty.34 

For  a  variety  of  reasons,  research  on  housemen  all  but  stopped  until  the 
mid-1980s  when  scholars  revisited  the  topic,  often  using  new  materials  and 
offering  new  perspectives.  In  1984,  the  Chinese  scholar  Xiao  Xu  examined 
housemen  with  particular  attention  to  their  development  in  Liaodong 
(sometimes  referred  to  as  southern  Manchuria),  a  strategic  region  that 
bordered  Korea,  Jurchen  lands  (i.e.,  whose  inhabitants  would  become  the 
Manchus),  and  the  eastern  edge  of  Mongolia.35  Like  Wu  Han  and  most 
Chinese  scholars,  Xiao  attributed  the  rise  of  housemen  to  the  collapse  of 
the  garrison  system  and  dated  it  to  early  in  the  fifteenth  century,  when 
a  portion  of  housemen  was  recruited  from  among  the  ranks  of  garrison 
soldiers  -  a  practice  that  was  not  officially  recognized  until  late  in  the 
century.  Xiao  argued,  however,  that  the  primary  source  of  housemen  was 
hired  soldiers,  that  is,  men  not  registered  in  hereditary  military  households 
who  voluntarily  undertook  military  service  for  a  limited  term  in  exchange 
for  money. 

Perhaps  Xiao's  greatest  contribution  was  his  attention  to  shifting  patterns 
of  funding  for  housemen.  Early  housemen  were  privately  recruited  and 
privately  funded  by  commanders.  One  early  source  of  funding  was  the 
income  derived  from  lands  seized  by  military  commanders,  as  Suzuki  had 
noted.  Some  commanders  squeezed  funds  allocated  for  garrison  troops 
under  their  commander  to  support  their  housemen.  Others  resorted  to 
criminal  activities.  Late  Ming  commanders  such  as  the  famed  Li  Chengliang 
supported  themselves  through  war  booty,  horse  rustling  in  the  borderlands, 
and  coercive  manipulation  of  prices  in  border  markets.36 

As  the  number  of  housemen  grew  and  their  importance  to  dynastic 
defenses  became  clearer,  the  central  government  took  a  more  prominent 
role  in  financing  their  upkeep.  Xiao  observed  that,  during  the  mid-sixteenth 

34  Suzuki,  "Mindai  katei  ko",  pp.  36-39. 

35  Xiao,  "Mingdai  jiangshuai  jiading  de  xingshuai  ji  qi  yingxiang". 

36  Ibid.,  pp.  110-111;  Ma,  "Mingdai  de  jiading",  pp.  234-235. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


53 


century,  the  central  government  gradually  made  explicit  its  commitment 
to  supplying  funds  for  food,  arms,  rewards,  and  mounts  for  the  housemen. 
The  process  accelerated  during  the  last  quarter  of  the  century  until  the 
costs  for  housemen  were  being  figured  into  the  annual  subsidies  supplied 
by  the  central  government  to  cover  border  defenses.37 

Although  scholarly  literature  generally  casts  any  deviation  from  the 
founding  Ming  emperor's  policies  as  decline  or  collapse,  a  far  better  ap- 
proach is  to  understand  such  changes  as  flexible  responses  to  evolving 
challenges.  As  one  of  the  largest  and  most  important  imperial  institutions 
in  Ming  China,  the  military  was  sensitive  to  developments  in  many  quarters, 
from  demographic  trends  (including  not  only  population  size  but  also  migra- 
tion and  family  structure),  economic  transformation  (including  the  growing 
size  of  regional  markets  and  the  spreading  use  of  silver),  shifting  labor 
supplies,  bureaucratic  imperatives  (such  as  commuting  corvee  labor  and 
tax  obligations  into  silver  payments),  and  logistics  needs  (such  as  supplying 
large  numbers  of  men  far  from  economic  centres  for  extended  periods  of 
time). 

As  already  noted,  such  annual  subsidies  posed  an  increasingly  heavy 
burden  on  the  finances  of  the  central  government.  By  1590,  efforts  were 
afoot  to  cut  costs  by  thinning  the  ranks  of  housemen,  either  by  removing 
their  weakest  members  or  imposing  strict  caps  on  the  number  of  housemen 
allowed  for  commanders  of  different  ranks  -  ranging  from  ten  to  sixty. 
The  most  important  commanders  in  Liaodong,  including  members  of  the 
Li  family,  however,  ignored  the  new  measures.  The  court  did  not  push  the 
issue  for  fear  of  alienating  the  generals  in  a  time  of  dynastic  crisis,  and  the 
restrictions  became  an  empty  writ.38 

Xiao  also  offered  several  interesting  observations  on  the  changing  nature 
of  the  patronage  system  surrounding  the  housemen.  Xiao  argued  that  state 
funding  for  the  housemen  often  undermined  the  strong  personal  tie  estab- 
lished between  housemen  and  patrons  when  recruiting  and  support  had 
been  private.  In  some  cases,  personal  bonds  suffered  from  the  very  success  of 
housemen.  Xiao  offered  the  examples  of  the  housemen  of  Li  Chengliang  (all 
"surrendered  barbarians"),  who  were  rewarded  for  their  battlefield  exploits 
with  high  positions  and  independent  commands,  which  in  time,  weakened 


37  Xiao,  "Mingdai jiangshuai jiading  de  xingshuai ji  qi  yingxiang",  pp.  111-112;  Ma,  "Mingdai  de 
jiading",  pp.  235-237;  Zhao,  "Lun  Mingdai  jundui  zhong  jiading  de  tidianyu  diwei",  p.  147. 

38  Xiao,  "Mingdai  jiangshuai  jiading  de  xingshuai  ji  qi  yingxiang",  pp.  113-114;  Zhao,  "Lun 
Mingdai  junshi  jiading  zhidu  xingcheng  de  shehui  jingji  tiaojian  jiqi  fazhan",  pp.  88-89. 


54 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


their  ties  to  their  patron.39  He  also  noted  the  distinction  between  "in-garrison" 
and  "accompanying"  housemen.  The  former  were  recruited  to  serve  for  a 
designed  term  in  a  particular  garrison,  regardless  of  the  comings  or  goings  of 
individual  commanders.  The  latter,  in  contrast,  followed  their  patron,  even 
into  retirement  when  they  would  continue  to  serve  and  be  supported  by  their 
commander  despite  his  no  longer  holding  a  command.40  Housemen  who 
followed  their  patron  in  retirement  might  become  indistinguishable  from  the 
servants  or  long-term  tenants  of  local  elites.  In  other  cases,  they  comprised  a 
latent  pool  of  manpower  that  local  and  central  officials  attempted  to  mobilize 
in  times  of  crisis.41  For  the  most  part,  Zhao  Zhongnan  (see  below)  highlighted 
the  durability  of  the  personal  ties  between  housemen  and  their  patrons  in 
contrast  to  Xiao  who  emphasized  their  provisional  nature.42 

Critics  during  the  Ming  period  objected  that  the  growth  in  the  numbers 
of  housemen  ultimately  did  not  serve  dynastic  interests.  Drawing  able  men 
from  the  garrison  troops  only  hastened  the  garrison  system's  collapse.  The 
housemen's  military  successes  brought  their  commanders  dangerous  power 
and  ambition.  The  privileges  housemen  enjoyed  eroded  morale  within  the 
ranks  of  ordinary  soldiers.  Qi  Jiguang  (1528-1588),  a  prominent  general  who 
had  made  skilled  use  of  housemen  and  mercenaries,  wrote: 

Garrison  soldiers'  horses  are  given  to  housemen  to  ride;  garrison 
soldiers  themselves  are  given  to  housemen  as  servants;  garrison 
soldiers'  grain  is  given  to  housemen  for  their  support.  In  this  way,  we 
secure  the  hearts  of  200  or  300  men  but  completely  lose  the  hearts  of 
3,000  garrison  soldiers  under  our  command.43 

Other  officials  of  the  late  sixteenth  century  characterized  the  housemen 
as  essentially  parasitic,  siphoning  off  food,  labor,  horses,  and  money  from 
garrison  and  civilian  populations.  One  popular  jingle  of  the  time  held,  "If 
you  meet  up  with  the  Mongols,  you'll  still  have  your  life.  If  you  meet  up 
with  the  housemen,  you'll  have  nothing  left."  Xiao  thus  concluded,  "The 
housemen  system  not  only  held  within  itself  the  dependency  and  abuses 
inherent  in  the  garrison  system,  which  was  a  tool  that  exploited  the  classes 
and  oppressed  the  people",  it  added  entirely  new  abuses.  Among  these  he 

39  Xiao,  "Mingdai  jiangshuai  jiading  de  xingshuai  ji  qi  yingxiang",  pp.  114-116. 

40  Ibid.,  p.  115.  See  also  Ma,  "Mingdai  de  jingding",  pp.  229-231. 

41  Zhao,  "Lun  Mingdai  jundui  zhong  jiading  de  tidian  yu  diwei",  p.  147. 

42  Ibid.,  pp.  147-148. 

43  Qijiguang,  "Deng  tan  kou  shou",  in  Qi  Jiguang,  lian  bing  shijijuan  4,  cited  in  Xiao,  "Mingdai 
jiangshuai  jiading",  p.  117. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


55 


included  a  shameless  pursuit  of  self-interest  over  loyalty  to  commander 
or  dynasty  and  a  sharp  decline  in  the  quality  of  housemen  by  the  early 
seventeenth  century  as  men  signed  on  for  wages  and  commanders  padded 
the  rolls  in  order  to  extract  more  resources  from  the  state. 

The  last  major  essay  on  Ming  housemen  appeared  nearly  two  decades 
ago.  In  1991,  Zhao  Zhongnan  examined  the  socioeconomic  conditions  that 
undergirded  the  emergence  of  the  housemen.  Building  on  the  much  earlier 
work  of  Suzuki  Tadashi  and  Wang  Yuquan,  Zhao  Zhongnan  emphasized  the 
centrality  of  shifting  patterns  in  land  tenure.  The  concentration  of  lands  in 
the  hands  of  powerful  landlords  during  the  fifteenth  and  especially  sixteenth 
century  is  taken  as  granted  by  many  Chinese  and  Japanese  scholars.  Zhao, 
like  Suzuki,  believed  that  military  commanders  used  their  influence  to 
privatize  garrison  lands  on  a  large  scale,  creating  a  revenue  stream  sufficient 
to  support  housemen  and  withdrawing  the  lands  from  tax  registers.  At  the 
same  time,  garrison  soldiers  and  civilian  farmers  lost  their  lands  in  large 
numbers,  producing  a  pool  of  men  in  need  of  employment  and  protection. 
The  result,  maintained  Zhao,  was  multiple  layers  of  dependence  that  bound 
the  housemen  to  their  commanders/patrons.44  Again  following  Suzuki,  Zhao 
noted  that  the  shift  to  mercenaries  in  general  and  housemen  in  particular 
depended  on  the  partial  monetization  of  tax  and  labor  obligations  to  the 
state.45  Finally,  perhaps  Zhao's  most  important  contribution  was  the  explicit 
discussion  of  regional  variation  or  specificity  in  the  growth  of  housemen. 
In  this,  he  drew  on  the  work  of  previous  scholars  interested  in  Liaodong.46 

In  addition  to  garrison  regulars  drawn  from  Chinese  households  and 
the  use  of  hired  soldiers,  the  Ming  state  drew  soldiers  from  non-Chinese 
sources  in  the  wider  eastern  Eurasian  military  labor  market.47  Through  a 
variety  of  institutional  mechanisms  and  personal  connections,  the  Ming 
state  actively  recruited  Mongols,  Jurchens,  Tibetans,  Yao,  Zhuang,  and 
others  into  its  military.  The  Ming  valued  such  men  for  their  specialized 
skills  in  riding,  mounted  archery,  and  mountaineering,  their  temperament 
(fierceness  and  indifference  to  cold,  heat,  and  hunger)  as  "martial  races", 
and  the  fear  they  inspired  among  others.48 

44  Zhao,  "Lun  Mingdai  junshi  jiading  zhidu",  pp.  86-88. 

45  Ibid.,  p.  88. 

46  Ibid.,  pp.  88-89. 

47  For  preliminary  discussion  of  Ming  efforts  to  integrate  non-Chinese  personnel  into  the 
garrison  system,  see  So,  "Eijo  to  eijogun  -  gunshi  no  senju  hoho  o  chushin  ni". 

48  A  small  number  of  Japanese  laborers  and  warriors  who  fled  the  harsh  conditions  of  Hidey- 
oshi's  campaigns  in  Korea  in  the  1590s  were  also  impressed  into  Ming  military  service  (Swope, 
A  Dragon's  Head  and  a  Serpent's  Tail,  p.  215). 


56 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


For  the  most  part,  such  non-Chinese  in  the  employ  of  the  Ming  state  were 
settled  on  the  northern  frontier.  Their  leaders  generally  received  military 
titles  within  the  imperial  Ming  government  commensurate  with  their  previ- 
ous local  status.  On  one  end  of  the  spectrum,  those  settled  within  Ming 
borders  received  lands,  salaries,  and  periodic  gifts  from  the  throne.  They 
were  also  expected  to  fight  in  imperial  campaigns,  usually  against  relatively 
nearby  foes.  They  could  expect  promotions  and  further  rewards  for  valor 
and  success  on  the  battlefield.  Although  recognized  as  distinct  from  regular 
garrison  troops,  these  men  and  their  families  were  subject  to  supervision  by 
Ming  military  authorities  (both  local  and  central).  Thus,  while  Mongol  men 
might  fight  as  a  Mongol  unit  under  a  Mongol  commander  perhaps  against 
other  Mongols  (but  equally  likely  against  Chinese  rebels  or  aboriginal 
revolts),  overall  command  remained  in  the  hands  of  Chinese  generals. 
Chinese  bureaucrats  vetted  battlefield  exploits,  processed  paperwork  for 
promotions  or  permission  to  relocate,  maintained  household  registration 
in  military  garrisons,  and  adjudicated  criminal  and  civil  legal  matters.49 

At  the  other  end  of  the  spectrum,  Ming  control  was  largely  nominal.  The 
Ming  state  recognized  certain  Jurchen  leaders,  granted  them  nominal  titles 
in  the  Ming  military,  designated  their  polities  as  garrisons,  and  permitted 
them  access  to  the  Chinese  economy  through  horse  markets  on  the  border 
and  gift  exchanges  (and  opportunities  for  private  trade)  during  "tribute" 
missions  to  the  capital  in  Beijing.  Through  appeals  to  their  sense  of  obliga- 
tion, gratitude,  and  self-interest,  the  Ming  state  attempted  to  influence 
the  behavior  of  Jurchen  groups.  Such  efforts  ranged  from  trying  to  ensure 
the  safe  passage  of  Korean  envoys  through  Jurchen  lands  to  allying  with 
certain  Jurchen  leaders  against  others  to  prevent  unification  in  Manchuria. 
During  the  late  sixteenth  and  early  seventeenth  centuries,  many  of  the 
leading  commanders  in  Liaodong  maintained  as  many  as  several  hundred 
Mongol  and  Jurchen  warriors  as  housemen.  Contemporary  writings  stressed 
their  ferocity  in  battle,  their  skill  in  scouting,  and  their  importance  to  their 
commanders'  success.50  Mongol  and  Jurchen  leaders,  however,  also  recruited 
Ming  personnel,  including  military  men;  the  rise  of  the  Manchus  (who 
would  eventually  conquer  the  Ming  and  establish  the  Qing  dynasty,  which 

49  Henry  Serruys  wrote  the  foundational  work  on  the  Ming  Mongols.  For  more  recent  work  (and 
full  citation  to  Serruys),  see  Robinson,  "Images  of  Subject  Mongols  under  the  Ming  Dynasty", 
"Politics,  Force,  and  Ethnicity". 

50  Xiao,  "Mingdai  jiangshuai  jiading",  pp.  108-109;  Zhao,  "Lun  Mingdai  jundui  zhong  jiading 
de  tidian  yu  diwei",  pp.  144-145.  Like  Wu  Han,  Ma  Chujian  noted  that  the  practice  of  recruiting 
Mongols  and  Jurchen  as  mercenaries  dated  back  to  the  early  fifteenth  century:  "Mingdai  de 
jiading",  pp.  223-225.  For  the  Jurchens,  see  Rossabi,  The  Jurchens  in  the  Yuan  and  Ming. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


57 


is  discussed  in  the  chapter  by  Christine  Moll-Murata  and  Ulrich  Theobald) 
is  inseparable  from  this  phenomenon.51  Thus,  at  least  on  the  northern 
border,  the  Ming  state  (and  individual  commanders)  had  to  compete  on 
an  international  military  labor  market  with  other  prospective  employers. 

Somewhere  in  the  middle  were  communities  of  non-Chinese  that  were 
loosely  integrated  into  the  Ming  polity  and  that  were  expected  to  contribute 
military  forces  only  upon  request.  On  the  southwestern  and  northwestern 
peripheries,  the  Ming  state  recognized  local  leaders  from  families  that  had 
often  held  power  for  centuries.  Recognition  from  the  Ming  throne,  access 
to  Chinese  economic  resources,  and  occasional  recourse  to  Ming  military 
support  strengthened  the  position  of  these  local  leaders.  However,  the  admin- 
istration of  regions  under  their  control  was  staffed  by  local  men  rather  than 
officials  dispatched  by  the  central  government.52  Local  populations  were  not 
rigorously  integrated  into  the  household  registration  system.  One  scholar  has 
characterized  the  result  as  "dual  sovereignty".53  During  the  periodic  struggles 
among  local  elites,  incumbents  and  challengers  might  call  upon  Ming  sup- 
port. The  Ming  state,  however,  had  a  poor  record  of  exercising  effective  con- 
trol. Many  officials  argued  against  becoming  entangled  in  violent  struggles 
that  were  imperfectly  understood  and  seldom  essential  to  critical  strategic 
interests  of  the  dynasty.54  However,  local  leaders  regularly  contributed  units  of 
men  to  bolster  Ming  imperial  forces  in  campaigns  throughout  most  of  China. 

Finally,  before  turning  to  our  common  comparative  axes  and  taxonomies, 
some  discussion  of  the  changing  composition  of  wages  is  in  order.  Early  in 
the  dynasty,  active-service  men  from  hereditary  military  households  -  from 
senior  officers  to  humble  soldiers  -  picked  up  salaries  in  kind  each  month 
from  imperial  granaries.  Dynastic  regulations  stipulated  that  each  month 
a  garrison  commander  was  to  receive  12  shi  (each  shi  was  equivalent  to  3.1 
bushels  or  about  130  pounds),  an  assistant  commander  8.5  shi,  a  chiliarch 
(that  is,  a  commander  of  roughly  1,000  troops)  5.4  shi,  a  battalion  com- 
mander 1.5  shi,  and  a  common  soldier  1  shi.  Married  soldiers  with  depend- 
ants generally  received  approximately  20  per  cent  to  30  per  cent  more  than 
single  soldiers  without  dependants.  However,  due  to  a  variety  of  factors, 
all  ranks  generally  received  only  between  half  and  two-thirds  of  their 

51  Iwai,  "China's  Frontier  Society  in  the  Sixteenth  and  Seventeenth  Centuries";  Wei,  "Mingdai 
Menggu  zhubu  dui  guishun  Hanren  de  renyong jiqi  junshi  yingxiang". 

52  There  was  periodic  debate  about  the  relative  advantages  of  staffing  by  local  men  or  those 
dispatched  from  the  central  government. 

53  Herman,  Amid  the  Clouds  and  Mists,  pp.  105-117. 

54  Shin,  The  Making  of  the  Chinese  State,  pp.  56-105. 


58 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


official  salaries  (see  below).55  Even  taking  into  account  the  loss  of  wages 
to  individual  soldiers,  the  financial  burden  to  the  state  was  considerable. 
In  1373  for  instance,  the  state  distributed  more  than  3  million  shi  of  grain 
just  to  troops  in  the  capital  at  Nanjing.56  Finally  in  the  early  decades  of  the 
dynasty,  the  state  provided  monthly  stipends  of  0.5  shi  to  the  widows  of 
soldiers,  provided  they  did  not  remarry.57 

Before  I  address  the  considerable  temporal  and  spatial  variations  behind 
these  figures,  however,  a  broader  picture  of  wages  and  prices  provides  some 
perspective  on  the  position  of  military  labor.  As  an  overarching  general- 
ity, garrison  soldiers  earned  approximately  the  same  wages  as  an  average 
urban  laborer,  while  officers  received  more.  According  to  Ray  Huang,  rural 
men  specially  recruited  by  the  famous  general  Qi  Jiguang  during  the  mid- 
sixteenth  century  were  also  "paid  at  the  rate  of  day  laborers".58  Both  garrison 
regulars  and  hired  soldiers  enjoyed  the  possibility  of  rewards  for  action  on 
the  battlefield  such  as  taking  enemy  heads  or  particularly  valorous  acts. 

During  the  waning  decades  of  the  sixteenth  century,  servants  in  the 
county  offices  of  Wanping  (in  Beijing)  earned  on  average  4.2  ounces  of 
silver  each  year,  wages  in  rice  having  largely  been  converted  to  payments 
in  silver.  Porters,  water  carriers,  and  day  laborers  in  the  capital  earned 
about  the  same.  During  the  last  half  of  the  sixteenth  century,  1  shi  of  rice 
was  normally  worth  a  bit  more  than  half  a  tael  of  silver  (but  subject  to 
market  fluctuations  especially  in  times  of  harvest  failures).  Clerks  in  the 
government  offices  in  Wanping  earned  6  dou  (one  dou  was  equivalent  to 
9.9  quarts)  each  month  but  also  received  accommodation  and  furnishings. 
The  income  of  most  of  the  working  urban  population  in  Beijing  fell  between 
4  and  6  ounces  of  silver  a  year. 

Given  the  relatively  modest  wages  of  Ming  soldiers,  rewards  and  bonuses 
could  constitute  a  significant  addition  to  their  routine  revenue.  The  variety 
and  scale  of  "gifts"  from  the  throne  are  discussed  below.  Killing  an  enemy  in 
battle  could  earn  bonuses  of  between  10  and  30  ounces  of  silver  -  provided 
that  a  state  official  verified  the  circumstances  of  the  kill  and  the  identity 

55  Kawagoe,  "DaiMin  kai  ten  ni  mieru  Mindai  eijokan  no  getsuryogaku  o  megutte",  pp.  39-40. 

56  Okuyama,  "Kobucho  no  men  ma  no  shikyu  ni  tsuite",  p.  12. 

57  Okuyama,  "Minsho  ni  okeru  gunshi  no  kazoku  to  yukyu  ni  tsuite".  Okuyama  suggests  that 
as  a  result  of  government  stipend  incentives,  the  early  Ming  capital  in  Nanjing  was  home  to  a 
large  number  of  military  widows. 

58  Huang,  758/,  A  Year  of  No  Significance,  p.  172.  Qi's  men,  who  were  recruited  in  southern  China, 
received  10  ounces  of  silver  a  year.  When  they  were  deployed  near  the  Great  Wall  in  the  north, 
wages  increased  to  18  ounces  a  year  (ibid.,  p.  251  n.  67).  These  are  prescriptive  figures  that  do 
not  take  into  account  possible  losses  through  corruption  or  administrative  inefficiency. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


59 


of  the  corpse.  Even  amounts  that  might  seem  trivial  on  first  glance  in  fact 
were  proportionally  large.  For  instance,  in  1510  as  part  of  its  effort  to  mollify 
soldiers  from  the  northwestern  garrisons  of  Ningxia,  the  court  awarded 
each  soldier  1  ounce  of  silver,  a  bonus  amounting  to  approximately  one 
month's  wages.59 

In  terms  of  purchasing  power,  in  the  capital  during  the  late  sixteenth 
century,  1.3  pounds  of  wheat  flour  cost  0.008  ounces  of  silver;  a  pound  of  pork 
was  0.02  ounces  of  silver;  a  pound  of  either  mutton  and  beef  was  0.015  ounces 
of  silver;  a  pound  of  pears  was  0.05  ounces  of  silver,  and  eggplants  cost  0.004 
ounces  of  silver  each.60  During  the  late  sixteenth  and  early  seventeenth 
centuries,  a  painting  from  the  previous  Song  or  Yuan  dynasties  might  fetch 
anywhere  from  5  to  10  ounces  of  silver  to  the  astronomical  figure  of  1,000 
ounces.61 

As  noted  above,  the  Ming  founder  hoped  that  military  units  would  be 
largely  self-supporting.  To  that  end,  each  active-service  soldier  was  to  re- 
ceive 50  mou  (1  mou  was  approximately  0.14  acre;  50  mou  was  about  7  acres) 
of  land,  which  he  shared  with  other  male  immediate  family  members  of  the 
original  military  household  who  had  traveled  with  him.  The  active-service 
soldier  was  to  keep  half  of  the  harvest  to  support  himself  and  his  family; 
the  rest  was  to  be  turned  over  to  garrison  authorities.  In  reality,  variation 
in  the  quality  and  availability  of  land  ensured  that  soldiers  received  plots  of 
different  sizes.  On  the  northern  border,  where  soil  was  relatively  poor  and 
the  population  relatively  sparse,  and  where  this  arrangement  was  intended 
as  a  way  to  stimulate  agricultural  development,  a  soldier  might  farm  70  or 
80  mou  (approximately  10  and  11  acres,  respectively),  whereas  in  places  like 
the  southeast  with  more  productive  lands  and  less  land  available,  he  might 
receive  only  20  mou  (less  than  3  acres). 

During  the  first  half  of  the  fifteenth  century,  the  amount  of  grain  that  the 
state  derived  from  these  lands  (nominally  half  the  production)  fluctuated 
sharply.  One  Japanese  scholar  has  documented  a  dramatic  drop  from  ap- 
proximately 20  million  shi  (62  million  bushels  or  1.3  million  tons)  to  5  million 
shi  (325,000  tons)  in  the  two  decades  between  1403  and  1424.  After  a  brief 
rise  to  9  million  shi,  by  1434,  the  figure  seems  to  have  dropped  to  2  million. 
Thus  within  the  space  of  thirty  years,  the  revenue  from  farmlands  available 

59  Ming  Wuzong  shilu,  62.ioa-i2a;  67.1b.  However,  to  put  this  into  perspective,  one  senior  court 
minister  received  100  ounces  of  silver  for  his  contribution  to  putting  down  the  same  abortive 
princely  revolt.  See  Li,  "Zou  wei  ci  mian  en  ming  shi",  II,  pp.  518-519. 

60  These  figures  come  from  Geiss,  "Peking  under  the  Ming  (1368-1644)",  pp.  156, 177-189. 

61  Clunas,  Appendix  II,  "Selected  Prices  for  Works  of  Art  and  Antique  Artifacts  c.  1560-1620". 


60 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


for  soldiers'  salaries  dropped  by  go  per  cent.62  It  is  unclear,  however,  whether 
this  was  merely  the  amount  transported  to  the  capital  or  if  it  included  the 
amount  received  locally  by  the  garrison  administration.  After  all,  there  had 
to  be  sufficient  grain  available  locally  for  the  garrisons  to  feed  the  troops. 

The  government  responded  in  several  ways,  depending  on  the  nature  of 
the  local  economy  and  the  particular  needs  of  the  moment.  In  economically 
developed  regions,  commercial  taxes  were  used  to  pay  military  salaries.  For 
instance,  in  affluent  Jiading,  a  portion  of  commercial  taxes  civil  authorities 
assessed  on  shop  fronts  went  to  salaries  in  nearby  Taicang  and  Zhenjiang 
Garrisons.  As  noted  above,  salaries  for  soldiers  on  the  northern  border  were 
often  subsidized  by  generous  annual  payments  from  the  central  government. 

A  related  question  is  the  nature  of  wages.  The  Ming  founder  set  salaries 
in  rice.  Rice  does  not  grow  equally  well  in  all  places  (and  not  at  all  along  the 
northern  border  mentioned  above),  is  expensive  to  transport  overland  because 
of  its  weight,  and  is  subject  to  rotting  if  not  properly  stored.  Thus,  some  kind  of 
conversion,  if  only  into  other  grains  or  beans,  had  always  been  in  place.  By  the 
early  fifteenth  century,  the  Ming  state  began  to  commute  a  portion  of  monthly 
wages  into  paper  currency.  Thus  for  example,  a  garrison  commander  who  drew 
a  monthly  salary  of  10  ski  might  receive  80  per  cent  in  rice;  the  state  would  then 
convert  the  value  of  the  remaining  2  shi  of  rice  into  paper  money.  During  the 
Ming  (unlike  the  Yuan  period),  however,  paper  money  never  really  caught  on. 
In  fact,  it  rapidly  and  consistently  lost  value.  Hence,  even  partial  commutation 
of  wages  into  paper  currency  was  not  popular  among  military  families  for 
obvious  reasons.  During  the  1430s,  one  source  of  resentment  against  Mongol 
officers  stationed  in  Beijing  was  that  they  received  their  entire  salary  in  rice. 

In  response  to  these  complaints,  by  the  mid-fifteenth  century,  the  Ming 
state  often  commuted  a  portion  of  military  salaries  into  items  such  as  cotton 
textiles,  black  pepper,  and  other  spices.  By  the  mid-sixteenth  century,  the 
commutation  of  salaries  into  silver  became  increasingly  common. 

Shifting  military  challenges  shaped  wages.  Okuyama  Norio  has  shown 
that  the  Ming  state's  deployment  of  large  numbers  of  troops  to  the  northern 
border  for  an  extended  period  of  time  in  the  wake  of  the  Tumu  defeat  of  1449 
deeply  influenced  soldiers'  wages.  As  noted  above,  soldiers  normally  received 
their  salaries,  whether  in  grain,  cash,  or  otherwise,  from  the  granaries  of 
the  garrisons  in  which  they  served.  During  short-term  deployments,  to  the 
northern  border  for  instance,  local  border  garrisons  would  pay  them  "travel 
wages"  until  they  returned  home.  Dependants,  who  did  not  accompany 

62  Kawagoe  Yasuhiro,  "DaiMin  kai  ten  ni  mieru  Mindai  eijokan  no  getsuryogaku  o  megutte", 
PP-  39-40. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


61 


soldiers  on  such  tours,  continued  to  draw  the  monthly  salary  at  the  home 
garrison  granaries.  When,  in  an  effort  to  meet  the  Mongol  challenge,  the 
Ming  state  deployed  tens  of  thousands  of  soldiers  from  hinterland  garrisons 
to  the  north  for  years  at  a  time,  several  problems  emerged. 

Particularly  serious  was  the  question  of  dependants.  Soldiers  often 
returned  home  to  visit  their  families,  with  or  without  permission.  To 
ameliorate  such  a  problem,  the  state  experimented  with  having  family 
dependants  accompany  soldiers  and  officers  to  their  new  posts  rather  than 
remain  in  their  original  garrison  unit.  Another  problem  was  that  the  men's 
regular  salaries  were  still  disbursed  at  their  original  garrisons.  Traveling 
back  and  forth  to  pick  up  their  wages  was  time-consuming  and  expensive. 
Some  who  returned  home  to  pick  up  their  wages  did  not  return  to  their 
new  assignments.  Commanders  along  the  northern  border  (and  in  the 
southern  theater  where  Ming  armies  were  periodically  deployed  to  suppress 
aboriginal  uprisings)  successfully  petitioned  the  throne  to  allow  men  to 
receive  their  monthly  wages  from  granaries  wherever  they  were  currently 
deployed.  For  this  measure  to  work,  border  garrisons  (and  smaller  forts) 
needed  to  build  and  then  fill  new  granaries.  The  construction  of  granaries 
was  the  easy  part;  securing  sufficient  grain  on  an  ongoing  basis  proved 
more  challenging.  Administrative  measures  were  also  needed  to  ensure 
that  wages  were  not  paid  twice. 

As  noted  above,  transporting  grain  overland  was  expensive  and  time- 
consuming,  so  garrisons  experimented  with  a  number  of  alternate  strategies. 
One  was  more  extensive  use  of  commutation  into  items  that  could  be  easily 
transported  -  yet  families  still  needed  to  eat.  Another  was  for  garrisons  to 
dispatch  officers  to  travel  to  the  major  granaries  and  storehouses  of  the 
capital  and  elsewhere  to  pick  up  grain  on  behalf  of  the  entire  garrison; 
sell  it  locally  in  order  to  purchase  things  like  salt,  pepper,  etc.;  and  finally 
transport  these  goods  back  to  the  local  garrison.  There,  soldiers  would 
receive  the  goods  as  salary  and  sell  them  in  order  to  purchase  the  goods 
they  needed.  For  most  soldiers,  the  various  commutations  undermined  their 
economic  positions.  In  still  other  cases,  a  mixed  approach  was  adopted.  For 
instance,  soldiers  from  one  garrison  on  the  border  received  80  per  cent  of 
their  salaries  in  grain.  The  remaining  20  per  cent  was  commuted  to  cash, 
which  during  the  first  six  months  of  the  year,  they  could  pick  up  at  local 
government  offices.  During  the  second  half  of  the  year,  20  per  cent  of  their 
salary  was  commuted  to  pepper  and  other  spices,  which  they  had  to  get  in 
specialized  storehouses  in  the  capital.63 


63   This  section  is  drawn  from  Okuyama,  "Mingun  no  kyuyo  shikyu  ni  tsuite",  pp.  133-143. 


62 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


At  the  same  time  that  the  Ming  military  responded  to  shifting  economic, 
demographic,  and  administrative  needs,  it  also  transformed  China.  Econom- 
ic historians  have  pointed  out  that  the  network  required  to  supply  northern 
frontier  garrisons  with  goods  from  the  south  was  one  of  the  central  factors 
shaping  the  entire  Ming  economy,  including  its  banking  and  monetization. 

Sixteenth-century  officials  were  acutely  aware  that  commuting  soldiers' 
salaries  into  silver  subjected  them  to  fluctuations  in  the  price  of  grain. 
Many  reported  to  the  throne  that  1  shi  of  grain  was  commonly  converted 
into  0.7  taels  of  silver,  sufficient  to  purchase  only  0.6  or  0.7  shi  of  rice  on  the 
market.  In  some  cases,  the  rate  was  as  low  as  0.2  shi,  a  loss  of  80  per  cent 
of  the  nominative  value  of  soldiers'  salaries.  Officials  debated  how  to  best 
address  this  vulnerability  to  price  variation  and  impoverishment  of  military 
families.  In  1538,  the  court  approved  plans  to  adjust  rates  of  commutation 
according  to  grain  prices.  However,  throughout  the  rest  of  the  sixteenth 
century,  the  problem  persisted.  Either  adjustments  lagged  too  far  behind 
market  changes  or  local  officials  were  reluctant  to  break  from  established 
conversion  rates.  Another  solution  was  a  partial  return  to  payment  in  kind, 
most  commonly  with  soldiers  receiving  rice  for  three  months  of  the  year 
and  silver  for  the  remaining  nine  months.64 

Local  officials,  individual  military  commanders  and  court  ministers 
worked  to  address  questions  as  they  arose  and  showed  considerable  flex- 
ibility in  their  approach  to  the  economic  and  military  challenges  posed 
by  changes  in  determining,  funding,  and  distributing  soldiers'  wages.  As 
one  might  expect  given  the  larger  socioeconomic  changes  transforming 
China,  however,  there  was  no  simple  solution  that  perfectly  matched  the 
demands  of  the  state  with  the  needs  of  its  military  personnel.  Throughout 
the  sixteenth  century,  soldiers  (and  their  officers)  periodically  organized 
protests,  especially  in  garrisons  along  the  northern  border,  almost  always 
in  response  to  state  actions  that  undercut  their  economic  interests.  These 
ranged  from  short-term  and  poorly  coordinated  cases,  where  violence 
was  limited  to  screaming  in  the  night  and  the  threat  of  more,  to  military 
uprisings  that  lasted  for  months  and  required  large-scale  responses  from 
the  central  government.65 

64  Okuyama,  "Mindai  no  hokuhen  ni  okeru  gunji  no  getsuryo  ni  tsuite",  pp.  155-162. 

65  In  1509-1510,  riots  and  at  least  one  mutiny  greeted  the  court's  efforts  to  reassess  tax  rates  on 
military  farmlands  (Robinson,  "Princely  Revolts  and  the  Ming  Polity").  For  discussion  of  mutinies 
in  Liaodong  in  1535,  see  Morohoshi,  "Mindai  Ryoto  no  gunton  ni  kansuru  ichi  kosatsu",  "Ryoto 
heihen  to  Ro  Kei".  On  the  mid-century  mutinies  in  Datong,  see  Hagiwara,  "Mindai  Kaseiki  no 
Daito  hanran  to  Mongoria".  On  the  1592-1593  Ningxia  mutiny,  see  Okano,  "Banreki  nijunen  Neiha 
heihen";  Swope,  "All  Men  Are  Not  Brothers". 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


63 


Variables,  axes,  taxonomies,  and  hypothesis 

Zhao  Zhongnan  has  been  among  the  few  scholars  to  discuss  the  legal  status 
of  housemen.  He  argues  that  although  they  may  have  enjoyed  a  superior 
social  status  as  measured  in  terms  of  their  salaries  and  privileges  granted 
by  their  patrons,  they  possessed  the  same  legal  status  as  garrison  troops. 
The  Ming  Code,  the  imperial  legal  code  of  the  Ming  dynasty,  distinguished 
between  those  registered  in  civilian  households  and  men  registered  in 
hereditary  military  households,  most  especially  active-service  soldiers. 
Zhao  points  to  a  regulation  in  the  Collected  Administrative  Statutes  of  the 
Great  Ming  Dynasty,  which  stipulates  that  housemen  were  subject  to  the 
same  Grand  Reviews  conducted  by  senior  officials  in  the  Chief  Military 
Commission  and  Ministry  of  War  that  tested  skills  in  riding  and  archery. 
He  also  notes  that  when  their  patrons  were  demoted,  exiled,  or  suffered 
punitive  beatings,  housemen  were  subject  to  similar  punishments.66  This  is 
a  promising  line  of  inquiry  but  Zhao's  evidence  here  is  far  from  compelling 
in  terms  of  legal  status.  The  Great  Ming  Code  did  not  make  garrison  soldiers 
culpable  for  the  transgressions  of  their  commanding  officers.  Nor  did  it 
demand  troops  to  follow  their  commander  into  exile. 

The  legal  status  of  those  registered  in  hereditary  military  households, 
in  contrast,  was  clearer.  They  had  an  obligation  to  provide  lifetime  (or  at 
least  from  the  mid-  to  late  teens  to  around  60)  military  service  to  the  state, 
which  in  turn  entitled  them  to  regular  wages  (however  inadequate),  the  use 
of  government  lands  for  farming  for  their  own  or  accompanying  families 
(though  the  probability  of  securing  such  lands  diminished  over  the  course 
of  the  dynasty),  some  tax  and  corvee  breaks,  and  the  possibility  of  medical 
care  and  economic  assistance  if  they  fell  ill  or  were  injured.67  Maintaining 
the  massive  garrison  system,  including  its  affiliated  operations  such  as 
garrison  schools,  military  examinations,  training,  benefits  for  widowed 
wives  and/or  orphaned  children,  etc.,  registration,  and  the  voluminous 
paperwork  required  to  keep  things  functioning,  was  difficult  and  costly. 

The  Ming  state,  like  the  previous  Yuan  dynasty,  consciously  followed  a 
policy  that  kept  large  numbers  of  men  formally  registered  in  military  house- 


66  Zhao,  "Lun  Mingdai  jundui  zhong jiading  de  tidian  yu  diwei",  p.  148. 

67  Regional  variation  marked  the  availability  of  medicine  and  quality  of  doctors  for  garrisons, 
as  an  official  from  the  northwestern  frontier  of  the  empire  complained  in  1438  (Ming  Yingzong 
shilu,  37.8a).  Nonetheless,  the  state  was  expected  to  provide  such  resources  even  for  distant 
border  units. 


64 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


holds.68  As  noted  above,  this  was  done  to  maintain  a  broad  and  stable  labor 
pool  that  could  be  used  not  only  for  defending  the  dynasty  (e.g.,  guarding 
frontier  borders,  maintaining  internal  security,  and  suppressing  revolts)  but 
also  for  maintaining  its  infrastructure  (e.g.,  transporting  tax  grain,  construct- 
ing city  walls,  repairing  dikes  and  other  water  works,  etc.).  This  vast  dynastic 
labor  reservoir  also  served  a  prophylactic  function;  it  absorbed  men  who 
might  otherwise  contribute  to  rival  labor  pools,  such  as  criminal  bands,  rebel 
groups,  or  transnational  communities,  which  challenged  the  Ming  state. 

Few  contemporary  observers,  however,  viewed  these  arrangements  as 
either  foolproof  or  static.  In  their  discussions  of  the  military,  Ming  com- 
mentators regularly  invoked  the  phrase  "In  terms  of  soldiers,  quality  is  more 
precious  than  quantity."  Writing  in  the  late  sixteenth  century,  the  historian 
Lang  Ying  complained: 

Today  the  military  is  no  fewer  than  1  million  men  and  there  are  more 
than  200,000  in  the  capital.  This  can  be  said  to  be  ample.  Yet,  when  a 
region  has  a  crisis,  then  troops  are  deployed  from  the  Capital  Gar- 
risons, Datong,  and  Yulin  [border  regions].  Each  time  they  are  killed  in 
great  numbers.  High  ministers  devote  themselves  to  papering  things 
over.  When  compared  to  the  ancients  who  with  several  thousand  men 
would  decimate  the  enemy  and  with  several  tens  of  thousands  were 
unbeatable  wherever  they  turned,  they  were  really  no  match.  Today  we 
can  say  that  we  have  no  military.69 

Elsewhere,  Lang  turned  his  attention  to  the  comparative  efficacy  of  hired 
soldiers  and  imperial  regulars.  He  wrote  that  in  antiquity  the  establishment 
of  an  army  was  to  prevent  disaster,  but  that  in  his  day  the  establishment  of 
the  army  was  a  disaster.  He  argued  that  garrison  troops  contributed  nothing 
to  the  defense  of  the  dynasty  or  the  people.  In  cases  of  conflict,  those  who 
actually  engaged  the  enemy  were  either  local  commoners  or  hired  soldiers 
from  other  provinces.  Similarly,  those  who  died  at  the  hands  of  the  enemy 
were  either  male  and  female  subjects  from  the  area  or  those  recruited 

68  Although  the  even  earlier  Song  dynasty  (960-1279)  did  not  employ  the  hereditary  military 
household  system,  it  did  maintain  extremely  large  armies  at  great  expense  in  an  effort  to  impose 
effective  control  over  portions  of  the  population  that  might  otherwise  challenge  state  authority 
or  at  least  local  government.  The  state  also  frequently  turned  to  its  armies  as  a  general  source 
of  labor  for  infrastructure  projects. 

69  Lang,  "San  wu",  p.  154;  Ming  edn  held  at  Zhongshan  Library,  i3.iob-na;  reprinted  in  Si  ku 
quan  shu  cun  mu  cong  shu,  zi  102,  p.  545.  The  entry  was  entitled  "Three  Nones",  referring  to  no 
music,  no  history,  and  no  military. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


65 


from  elsewhere.  Thus,  the  dynasty  shouldered  the  burden  of  supporting 
garrison  troops  without  gaining  any  defense  for  the  people.  Lang  proposed 
that  the  state  hold  Grand  Reviews,  where  garrison  troops  would  compete 
with  hired  soldiers  in  archery  and  other  events.  If  the  garrison  troops  won, 
they  would  receive  half  the  money  used  to  pay  hired  soldiers.  If  the  hired 
soldiers  won,  half  the  grain  used  to  pay  garrison  troops  would  be  used  to 
hire  more  soldiers.70  Lang's  views  suggest  that  in  addition  to  socioeconomic 
changes,  shifting  elite  attitudes  toward  the  worth  of  the  hereditary  military 
household  system  may  have  facilitated  the  growing  use  of  hired  soldiers. 

Taxonomy  of  armies 

The  Ming  military  does  not  fit  easily  into  our  taxonomy  of  feudal  army, 
aggregate  contract  army,  state  commission  army,  conscript  army,  and  mod- 
ern volunteer  army  (or  John  Lynn's  slightly  wider  taxonomy  from  which  I 
draw).  Some  elements  of  the  Ming  case  resemble  the  state  commission  army. 
These  include  raising  the  army  from  among  the  ruler's  subjects  and  in  the 
case  of  hired  troops,  the  role  of  officers  in  recruiting  troops,  and  enlisting 
voluntarily  as  individuals.71  Yet,  the  core  of  the  Ming  army  at  least  through 
1500  was  the  hereditary  military  households  and  its  garrisons.  These  units 
were  not  recruited  by  officers  but  served  on  a  compulsory  basis  by  specially 
designated  households  that  legally  owed  the  state  military  labor. 

In  other  ways,  the  garrison  system  might  be  seen  as  a  sort  of  mass  reserve 
army  in  that  most  of  the  time  most  soldiers  spent  their  time  farming  rather 
than  drilling  or  fighting.  During  a  time  of  war,  armies  were  assembled  from 
the  ranks  of  garrison  troops  and  augmented  through  hired  soldiers  and/ 
or  aboriginal  forces.  Yet,  garrison  troops  generally  lived  in  or  near  garrison 
forts  and  cities,  received  wages  and  benefits  from  the  imperial  govern- 
ment, and  were  subject  to  bureaucratic  and  legal  treatment  distinctive  to 
hereditary  military  households. 

At  the  risk  of  sounding  a  discordant  note  in  our  common  enterprise,  I 
would  suggest  that  assigning  the  Ming  a  place  within  a  taxonomy  explicitly 
derived  from  the  historical  particulars  of  western  Europe  (and  its  projec- 
tions) probably  obscures  more  than  it  illuminates.  Large  central  states 
emerged  early  in  China:  they  developed  fully  articulated  bureaucracies, 
demonstrated  the  ability  to  extract  considerable  resources  (labor,  material, 

70  Lang,  Jin  rijun,  II,  pp.  660-661. 

71  Lynn,  "The  Evolution  of  Army  Style  in  the  Modern  West",  p.  518. 


66 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


and  money)  from  enormous  populations  that  pursued  diversified  economic 
and  social  strategies,  and  possessed  advanced  technological  and  logistical 
(including  military)  capabilities.  They  predated  the  rise  of  "nation-states" 
in  Europe  by  many  centuries.  The  lack  of  anything  comparable  to  the 
European  aristocracy  (after  the  tenth  century),  the  early  and  sustained 
dominance  of  the  imperial  throne  in  the  political  and  ideological  realms, 
and  the  lack  of  contending  paradigmatic  armies  (which  is  not  the  same 
as  the  disinclination  or  inability  to  adapt  new  technologies  or  methods) 
meant  that  many  of  the  critical  causal  factors  implicit  in  our  taxonomy 
are  less  germane  than  they  are  in  the  case  of  western  Europe.  This  is  not 
to  argue  for  a  distinctive  Oriental  warfare  per  se  but  to  acknowledge  that 
the  development  of  the  Chinese  military  followed  a  different  trajectory  or 
at  least  a  different  chronology  (certainly  prior  to  1800)  than  the  one  Lynn 
identified  (and  which  he  explicitly  described  as  "a  cultural  and  geographical 
pattern  unique  to  the  West").72  Given  that  we  are  attempting  to  provide  a 
global  perspective  on  military  labor,  we  should  not  reduce  the  rich  diversity 
of  historical  experience  of  places  such  as  China,  Russia,  or  India  to  schemata 
derived  from  the  recent  "West".  The  more  pressing  task  would  seem  to  be 
to  reformulate  our  ideas  in  the  light  of  new  research  and  a  wider  body  of 
empirical  information.73  Even  allowing  for  such  caveats,  some  of  our  other 
terms  of  comparison  have  clear  applicability  for  the  Chinese  case. 

Free/unfree  labor 

On  first  blush,  soldiers  registered  in  hereditary  military  households  would 
seem  in  most  ways  to  fall  into  the  category  of  unfree  labor.  They  spent  the 
vast  majority  of  their  time  as  tenant  farmers  on  government-allocated  lands 
and  were  subject  to  life  service  in  the  ranks  of  the  imperial  military.  They 
did  not  enter  into  this  service  voluntarily;  it  was  a  hereditary  responsibil- 
ity of  the  household  into  which  they  were  born.  To  abandon  their  lands, 
leave  their  posts,  or  avoid  their  burdens  was  to  invite  harsh  disciplinary 
retribution  by  the  Ming  state. 

72  Ibid.,  p.  506.  Different  trajectories  do  not  preclude  comparisons.  For  a  systematic  compara- 
tive study  of  the  "military  revolution"  in  Asia,  see  Lorge,  The  Asian  Military  Revolution.  Lorge 
argues  that  European  military  systems  and  possibly  governmental  institutions  needed  "to 
become  more  Chinese  before  they  could  take  full  advantage  of  guns"  (p.  21). 

73  For  calls  to  integrate  greater  historical  depth  and  geographical  variety  into  understandings 
of  labor  and  migration,  see  Van  der  Linden,  Workers  of  the  World,  pp.  1-6;  Hoerder,  Cultures  in 
Contact,  pp.  8-14;  Lucassen,  et  at,  Migration  History  in  World  History,  pp.  7-17. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


67 


However,  when  we  use  terms  such  as  "free"  and  "unfree"  labor,  we  must 
remember  that  from  its  earliest  days,  the  hereditary  household  system  was 
porous.  Escape  was  possible  through  illegal  means  such  as  bribes,  false 
registration,  self-maiming,  and  desertion.  More  importantly,  the  natural 
growth  in  the  size  of  families  meant  that,  over  time,  the  relative  burden  of 
military  service  for  the  entire  family  diminished.  It  might  pose  a  debilitat- 
ing burden  for  an  individual  man  or  even  his  immediate  family,  but  most 
members  of  the  extended  family  would  not  feel  the  pinch  at  all,  especially 
if  they  were  located  hundreds  of  miles  apart.  In  fact,  through  success  in 
business,  the  civil  service  examination,  or  crime,  they  could  put  substantial 
distance  between  themselves  and  relatives  who  served  in  military  garrisons 
or  in  military  agricultural  colonies.  Further  complicating  the  situation  was 
the  fact  that  many  soldiers  simultaneously  pursued  other  forms  of  employ- 
ment, which  ranged  from  the  sale  of  their  military  skills  and  equipment  to 
private  patrons,  to  menial  labor  in  roadside  eateries.  It  is  tempting  then  to 
see  them  as  what  Marcel  van  der  Linden  has  termed  "subaltern  workers". 74 

Hired  soldiers  during  the  Ming  should  be  considered  free  labor.  These 
included  both  men  who  served  in  militias  organized  by  county  magistrates 
or  local  elites  and  those  who  offered  their  services  as  military  retainers  or 
housemen  for  imperial  generals  or  civil  officials.  Men  who  fought  for  illicit 
groups  such  as  bandits,  pirates,  and  rebels  might  include  both  free  and 
unfree  labor,  depending  on  the  degree  and  variety  of  coercion  involved  in 
recruitment  and  retention. 

Commodified/noncommodified  labor 

As  many  scholars  have  shown,  conceptions  of  labor  and  wages  have  varied 
significantly  according  to  time  and  place.  Although  at  one  level,  commodi- 
fied  labor  may  be  understood  as  a  purely  financial  transaction  whereby  one 
party  remunerates  another  party  for  his  or  her  time,  skill,  and  productive 
labor,  such  relations  are  embedded  in  larger  social,  cultural,  and  religious 
structures.  Thus,  it  is  not  surprising  to  read  in  contemporary  Ming  sources 
that  the  imperial  throne  periodically  "bestowed  gifts"  of  gold,  silver,  paper 

74  For  insightful  comments  on  the  assumptions  implicit  in  common  notions  of  social  classes, 
see  Van  der  Linden,  Workers  of  the  World,  pp.  28-32.  Van  der  Linden  stresses  the  grey  areas 
between  social  classes,  that  most  subaltern  worker  households  combined  several  modes  of 
labor,  and  that  individual  subaltern  workers  often  "combined  different  modes  of  labor,  both 
synchronically  and  diachronically"  (p.  32). 


68 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


currency,  bolts  of  cotton,  winter  gowns,  shoes,  or  even  pepper  upon  its  sol- 
diers. The  scale  of  the  payments  was  frequently  enormous  and  represented 
a  sizeable  if  to  date  poorly  analyzed  portion  of  soldiers'  remuneration  from 
the  state.  As  an  illustrative  if  randomly  selected  example,  let  us  consider 
the  summer  of  1388  during  the  early  days  of  the  dynasty.  In  June  the  em- 
peror gave  more  than  209,300  soldiers  and  officers  from  Suzhou  and  other 
southern  garrisons  in  excess  of  109,900  taels  of  gold  and  silver,  30,000  taels 
in  paper  currency,  and  307,600  bolts  of  cloth.75  Little  more  than  two  weeks 
later,  the  court  announced  rewards  of  46,000  in  cash,  255,000  bolts  of  cot- 
ton textiles,  and  174,300  pounds  of  cotton  fabric  for  approximately  153,000 
troops  from  the  northern  garrisons  of  Beiping,  Jizhou,  and  elsewhere.76  In 
July,  the  throne  again  announced  gifts  for  nearly  200,000  soldiers  in  the 
Fuzhou  garrisons  and  almost  160,000  troops  in  the  Fujian  garrisons.77 

Such  gifts  from  the  throne  represented  a  considerable  transfer  of  wealth 
to  military  personnel.  One  study  has  calculated  that  between  1369  and  1374 
the  throne  issued  1  million  taels  of  silver  in  gifts.  Between  1368  and  1391, 
Hongwu  ordered  the  distribution  of  more  than  12  million  bolts  of  cotton 
textiles,  3  million  pounds  of  cotton,  and  1.7  million  sets  of  clothing  as  gifts. 
Approximately  80  per  cent  of  such  gifts  went  to  the  military.78 

This  rhetoric  of  imperial  munificence  owed  something  to  Hongwu's 
consistent  efforts  to  establish  authority  and  control  in  all  facets  of  Ming 
life.  He  adopted  the  pose  of  a  generous  patriarch  who  cared  for  his  people, 
including  his  warriors.  Imperial  mercy  and  munificence  were  to  be  recip- 
rocated with  gratitude,  loyalty,  and  the  desire  to  "repay  the  dynasty"  {bao 
guo,  bao  xiao).  The  rhetoric  of  reciprocal  obligations  was  not  restricted  to 
the  ruler  and  his  military  but  formed  a  pervasive  element  of  contempo- 
rary conceptions  of  social  life,  religious  practice,  and  political  behavior. 
It  is  worth  remembering  that  the  army  was  of  crucial  importance  to  the 
fledgling  regime.  To  the  degree  that  we  are  interested  in  Van  der  Linden's 
question  of  "which  perceptions  do  the  actors  on  the  stage  of  history  have 
of  the  reality  that  surrounds  them,  of  themselves,  and  [of]  each  other",  it 
is  important  not  to  dismiss  gifts  from  our  consideration  of  military  labor 
relations.79  Occasional  gifts  from  the  emperor,  in  contrast  to  regular  wages 
in  cash  and  kind  distributed  by  garrison  authorities,  were  intended  to  forge 

75  Ming  Taizu  shilu,  190.4a. 

76  Ibid.,  190.5b. 

77  Ibid.,  191.3b. 

78  Okuyama,  "Kobucho  no  men  ma  no  shikyu  ni  tsuite",  pp.  1-3. 

79  Van  der  Linden,  Workers  of  the  World,  p.  371. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


69 


a  direct  tie  between  the  Son  of  Heaven  and  humble  soldiers,  regardless  of 
how  tenuous  that  bond  may  have  been  in  reality. 

At  the  same  time,  Hongwu  was  fully  aware  that  many  officers  treated 
their  troops  poorly  and  repeatedly  reminded  his  commanders  that  they 
owed  their  success  to  the  efforts  of  the  common  soldier.80  Battles  were  won 
not  through  the  individual  heroics  of  generals  but  through  soldiers'  loyalty 
to  their  commanders  and  their  willingness  to  risk  their  lives  in  combat.  To 
win  such  loyalty,  commanders  had  to  care  for  the  material  needs  of  their 
men  on  a  regular  basis.81  Even  in  a  political  system  as  efficient  and  central- 
ized as  Ming  China,  and  even  with  his  exceptional  power,  Hongwu  had  no 
choice  but  to  rely  on  many  intermediate  levels  of  administration  to  collect 
and  distribute  wages,  supplies,  and  even  his  gifts  to  the  dynasty's  soldiers. 
For  this  reason,  he  tried  again  and  again  to  convince  the  officer  corps  that 
good  treatment  of  the  troops,  including  the  fair  and  timely  distribution  of 
wages,  was  integral  to  advancing  their  own  self-interest.82 

For  later  Ming  rulers  who  lacked  the  charisma  of  the  dynastic  founder, 
such  demonstrations  of  imperial  munificence  could  be  even  more  critical. 
Midway  through  the  dynasty  in  1521,  the  newly  enthronedjiajing  emperor, 
eager  to  secure  the  loyalty  of  his  military,  announced  his  intention  to  bestow 
2  taels  of  silver  on  each  border  soldier  in  recognition  of  their  hardships.  After 
consultation  with  the  Ministry  of  War  and  commanding  officers  from  the 
border,  the  court  disbursed  743,812  taels  of  silver  to  371,906  men.83  In  April 
1521,  his  cousin  and  predecessor  the  Zhengde  emperor  had  died  without 
an  heir  or  a  designated  successor.  Desperate  consultations  between  senior 
court  ministers  and  the  Empress  Dowager  led  to  the  choice  of  Jiajing,  a 
complete  outsider  to  the  capital  and  court  politics.  The  new  emperor  and 
his  advisors  purged  the  court  of  many  prominent  military  generals  who 
had  enjoyed  privileged  access  to  the  late  emperor.  Some  of  these  military 
men  had  originally  hailed  from  border  garrisons  such  as  Liaodong,  Datong, 
and  Xuanfu.  Thus,  Jiajing  no  doubt  considered  the  massive  sum  of  nearly 
750,000  taels  of  silver  a  smart  investment  in  his  future. 

Remuneration  as  gift-giving  was  not  restricted  to  emperors.  As  Arthur 
Waldron  has  noted,  nearly  one-third  of  one  early  sixteenth-century  official's 

80  Two  of  eight  injunctions  issued  on  one  occasion  in  August  1388  by  Hongwu  to  his  military 
commanders  related  directly  to  treating  their  men  with  benevolence  and  not  inflicting  injury 
on  them  (Ming  Taizu  shilu,  193.5a). 

81  Ibid.,  igi.3b-4b. 

82  Ibid.,  ig2.2b-3a. 

83  Ming  Shizong  shitu,  3.2a-b. 


70 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


budget  for  wall-building  was  dedicated  to  gifts  for  troops.84  Magistrates  and 
men  of  local  standing  similarly  appealed  to  the  rhetoric  of  gift-giving  in 
the  context  of  securing  military  labor.  In  times  of  crisis  when  men  of  either 
governmental  or  social  authority  needed  to  quickly  raise  levies  of  men  for 
local  militias,  they  held  large  banquets  for  which  they  would  slaughter  cows 
and  provide  liquor  to  recruits.  The  hope  was  that  by  showing  their  social 
inferiors  such  honor  and  respect,  elites  would  secure  the  men's  gratitude 
and  obedience,  at  least  long  enough  to  ride  out  the  crisis.  Accounts  of 
banquet-giving  are  often  accompanied  by  efforts  to  raise  funds  to  pay  for 
the  recruits.  Scattered  accounts  indicate  that  the  magistrate  or  man  of  local 
standing  might  sell  off  a  portion  of  his  personal  assets  to  generate  cash  to 
be  used  as  wages.  The  nitty-gritty  details  of  exactly  how  the  men  arranged 
such  transactions  and  with  whom  are  rarely  available. 

The  use  of  banquets  to  secure  the  allegiance  of  men  able  and  willing 
to  provide  military  service  was  not  restricted  to  men  employed  by  or  sup- 
porting the  state.  Rebels,  brigands,  and  other  men  of  violence  used  exactly 
the  same  methods  to  create  bonds  of  patron  and  client  or,  in  terms  more 
recognizable  to  men  of  the  day,  older  and  younger  brother,  lord  and  follower. 
The  enormously  popular  sixteenth-century  vernacular  novel  Heroes  of  the 
Water  Marsh  (Shut  hu  zhuan)  describes  scores  of  greater  and  lesser  such 
banquets.  In  addition  to  the  obvious  social  dimensions  of  these  banquets, 
they  also  served  as  an  economic  marker.  Only  a  patron  of  some  economic 
resources  could  hold  a  sufficiently  generous  banquet  that  would  allow 
conspicuous  consumption  of  meat  and  drink.  It  was  also  understood  that 
the  host,  whether  magistrate,  man  of  local  standing,  or  aspiring  brigand 
chief,  would  retain  the  services  of  his  men  only  so  long  as  he  continued  to 
pay  them. 

In  addition  to  regular  wages  paid  in  money  and/or  grain  and  periodic 
gifts  of  cash,  clothing,  or  food  items,  soldiers  received  special  rewards  for 
their  exploits  on  the  battlefield.  Ming  troops  who  killed  enemy  soldiers 
were  eligible  for  rewards  in  silver  or  promotion.  To  prove  their  claims,  Ming 
troops  were  required  to  present  the  decapitated  head  of  the  enemy  to  civil 
officials,  who  were  responsible  both  for  verifying  that  the  head  belonged 
to  an  enemy  combatant  rather  than,  say,  a  civilian  and  for  submitting  the 
paperwork.  Early  in  the  sixteenth  century,  the  posted  reward  for  an  enemy 
head  along  the  northern  border  was  50  taels  of  silver.  Private  markets  in 
places  such  as  Liaodong,  however,  sold  decapitated  enemy  heads,  a  practice 

84  Waldron,  The  Great  Wall  of  China,  p.  133. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


71 


that  the  imperial  government  tried  without  success  to  eliminate.85  Rates 
for  decapitated  heads  taken  from  the  hinterlands  or  from  the  southern 
border  were  generally  lower.  The  thinking  was  that  they  were  taken  from 
less  fearsome  foes. 

To  summarize,  the  Ming  military  labor  market  might  be  characterized 
as  flexible  and  segmented.  A  portion  of  military  labor,  those  registered  in 
hereditary  military  households,  was  unfree  insofar  as  such  men  were  legally 
bound  to  offer  military  service  to  the  state  for  their  entire  adult  life,  barring 
incapacitating  injury,  premature  death,  or  dismissal  for  misbehavior  or 
incompetence.  However,  it  should  be  remembered  that,  even  within  heredi- 
tary military  households,  only  a  small  proportion  of  men  were  called  upon 
to  render  military  (or  other)  labor  to  the  state.  Furthermore,  in  exchange 
for  their  labor,  they  received  wages  in  goods  and  cash. 

Hired  soldiers,  whether  engaged  for  short  or  long  terms,  should  be 
considered  free  labor  and  commodified  labor.  They  were  paid  primarily 
in  cash  by  the  imperial  government,  local  officials,  or  private  influential 
elites.  However,  part  of  their  "compensation  package"  regularly  included 
additional  "gifts"  such  as  food,  wine,  and/or  clothing.  These  gifts  were  es- 
sential in  the  formation  of  bonds  of  loyalty  and  reciprocal  obligation.  As 
incentives,  the  state  also  offered  cash  bonuses  and  promotions  to  both 
garrison  regulars  and  hired  soldiers. 

Remuneration  for  the  third  variety  of  Ming  military  labor,  aboriginal 
troops,  is  less  clear  but  perhaps  best  understood  as  a  variant  of  Lynn's  feudal 
or  aggregate  contract  army  in  the  following  sense.  Aboriginal  warriors 
might  owe  military  service  to  tribal  leaders,  who  in  turn  owed  military 
service  to  the  Ming  state.  Thus,  the  Ming  state  in  effect  contracted  en- 
tire contingents  of  aboriginal  warriors  rather  than  recruiting  individual 
members.  Aboriginal  leaders,  of  course,  expected  remuneration  from  the 
Ming  state.  Higher  titles,  gifts  (in  cash  and  kind)  from  the  throne,  and  field 
provisions  were  clearly  part  of  the  arrangement  between  the  Ming  state 
and  aboriginal  leaders.  Scattered  evidence  suggests  that  aboriginal  forces 
too  were  subject  to  the  trend  to  commute  supplies  and  wages  to  silver.  In 
the  mid-sixteenth  century,  aboriginal  troops  from  the  southwest  deployed 
to  fight  piracy  along  the  affluent  eastern  coastal  regions  received  80  per 
cent  of  the  value  of  their  allocation  of  rice,  fresh  vegetables,  and  fuel  for 
cooking  in  silver.86  Far  less  clear  is  whether  the  Ming  state  offered  additional 

85  Ming  Shizong  shilu,  3.11a. 

86  Xujie,  "Bi  jian  shi  yi  tiao",  in  Xu,  Shijing  tangji,  23.23b  (Wanli  edn  held  at  Beijing  University 
Library;  reprinted  in  Si  ku  quan  shu  cun  mu  cong  shuji  bu,  LXXX,  p.  103). 


72 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


cash  payments.  The  nature  of  labor  relations  and  compensation  between 
tribal  leaders  and  aboriginal  warriors  is  perhaps  the  most  opaque  part  of 
the  equation.  Thus,  on  the  questions  of  free/unfree  and  commodified/ 
noncommodified  labor,  further  research  is  needed. 

Deciding  factors  in  Ming  military  labor  relations 

With  the  exceptions  of  Suzuki  Tadashi  and  Zhao  Zhongnan,  scholars 
have  shown  limited  interest  in  relating  the  rise  of  housemen  (or  any  other 
developments  in  the  military)  to  wider  socioeconomic  developments.87  By 
the  mid-fifteenth  century,  the  Ming  economy,  including  the  assessment 
and  collection  of  taxes,  had  become  partially  monetized.  Labor  obligations 
to  the  state  could  often  be  met  through  the  payment  of  silver.88  Changes 
within  the  garrison  system  ultimately  resulted  from  wider  social  develop- 
ments. Although  Wu  Han,  Xiao  Xu,  and  others  were  no  doubt  correct  to 
draw  attention  to  widespread  corruption  within  the  garrison  system,  the 
entire  hereditary  household  system  -  whether  military,  saltern,  mining, 
craftsmen,  etc.  -  came  to  exercise  a  less  direct  influence  on  individual 
families.  People  moved,  families  diversified  their  economic  activities  and 
raised  their  social  aspirations.  This  was  less  dynastic  decline  than  a  natural 
sloughing  off  of  administrative  institutions  inherited  from  the  Mongol 
empire,  institutions  that  better  reflected  the  interests  and  perspectives 
of  the  Mongol  elite  than  the  realities  of  China's  society  or  economy.  The 
growth  of  housemen  and  mercenaries  of  all  kinds  should  be  seen  as  part 
and  parcel  of  the  overall  trend  toward  the  monetization  of  the  economy, 
particularly  service  and  labor.89 

However,  obligations  imposed  by  the  Ming  state  never  vanished  alto- 
gether. Indeed,  hereditary  obligations  linked  to  household  registration 
during  the  early  Ming  could  exercise  a  profound  influence  on  household  and 
lineage  strategies.  In  an  excellent  case  study  based  on  the  particulars  of  the 
southeastern  province  of  Fujian,  Michael  Szonyi  has  observed,  "informally, 

87  For  another  exception,  see  Qiu,  "Mingdai  zhongqianqi  junfei  gongji  tedian  de  xingcheng 
yu  yanbian". 

88  Heijdra,  "The  Socio-Economic  Development  of  Rural  China  during  the  Ming". 

89  Of  course,  private  retainers  and  mercenaries  were  a  longstanding  feature  of  Chinese  history, 
dating  back  to  the  earliest  imperial  dynasties  of  the  classical  period  (second  century  BC).  See 
Ma,  "Mingdai  de  jiading",  pp.  193-194.  Monetization  frequently  undermined  accepted  social 
hierarchies,  which  produced  considerable  unease  among  some  Ming  elite  men.  For  a  broad 
treatment,  see  Brook,  The  Confusions  of  Pleasure. 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


73 


military-registered  households  hired  mercenaries  themselves  to  fulfill  their 
obligations".  He  argues  that  "the  Ming  state's  military  and  taxation  systems 
drove  groups  of  kin  to  organize  themselves". 90 

Contemporary  observers  were  fully  aware  that  the  dynastic  military 
system  was  inextricably  tied  to  wider  socioeconomic  developments.  Propos- 
als were  floated  to  monetize  elements  of  military  obligation  to  the  state. 
For  instance,  the  "purification  of  troops",  that  is,  tracking  down  and/or 
replacement  of  missing  soldiers,  was  laborious,  expensive,  and  inefficient. 
Some  officials  argued  that  a  more  effective  policy  would  be  to  collect  a  fee  in 
silver  from  households  who  "owed"  an  active-service  soldier  to  the  state  -  in 
the  same  way  that  households  or  communities  that  owed  labor  to  the  state 
could  commute  the  responsibility  into  silver  payments  (a  transformation 
nearly  complete  by  the  1460s  for  some  categories  of  service).91  Deep  concern 
about  the  importance  of  the  hereditary  garrison  system  to  the  political, 
economic,  and  military  foundations  of  the  dynasty,  however,  stymied  any 
fundamental  reform. 

This  monetization  did  occur  with  some  forms  of  military  service.  The 
most  obvious  example  was  the  decision  to  hire  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  soldiers  to  augment  hereditary  garrison  forces  discussed  in  the  first 
section  of  the  paper  as  a  response  to  the  battle  of  Tumu  in  1449.  The  people's 
stalwarts  also  witnessed  a  high  degree  of  monetization.  During  the  1430s, 
local  administrators  in  various  parts  of  the  dynasty  had  begun  to  draft  men 
into  local  constabularies  called  people's  stalwarts,  that  is,  they  were  not 
members  of  military  households.  Following  the  debacle  at  Tumu,  people's 
stalwarts  were  recruited  in  far  larger  numbers  and  their  duties  expanded  to 
include  military  functions,  which  in  some  cases  meant  incorporation  into 
garrison  units.92  By  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century,  the  court  formalized 
the  policy  and  issued  orders  for  its  empire-wide  implementation.93  After 
experimenting  with  both  conscription  and  hiring,  many  local  magistrates 
concluded  that  hiring  military  labor  yielded  better  results  than  did  coercive 
recruiting.94  The  result  was  that  the  service  levy  appeared  as  a  line  item  in 

90  Szonyi,  Practicing  Kinship,  pp.  61  and  23. 

91  For  a  brief  discussion  and  citations  to  relevant  scholarship,  see  Wu  (Go),  Min  Shin  jidai  no 
yoekiseido  to  chiho  gyosei,  pp.  187-192. 

92  Kawagoe,  "Sokoki  no  minsosei  ni  tsuite". 

93  Scholars  debate  the  precise  year.  Saeki  Tomi  dates  the  national  policy  to  1489.  See  Saeki, 
"Min  Shin  jidai  no  minso  ni  tsuite",  p.  35.  Ray  Huang  sees  1494  as  the  year  it  became  dynastic 
policy.  See  Huang,  Taxation  and  Governmental  Finance  in  Sixteenth-Century  China,  p.  111. 

94  Kawagoe  stresses  the  importance  of  conscription  during  the  1450S-1480S  ("Sokoki  no 
minsosei  ni  tsuite",  pp.  26-27). 


74 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


local  budgets,  as  say,  forty  people's  stalwarts,  with  between  2  and  10  taels 
of  silver  designated  for  each  man's  pay.95  By  1500  or  so,  the  silver  to  hire 
militiamen  was  regularly  apportioned  across  the  local  population,  in  the 
form  of  either  a  land  or  a  poll  tax.9*5  Estimates  of  how  many  people's  stalwarts 
were  hired  vary,  but  the  scale  was  considerable  -  somewhere  between 
200,000  and  300,000  during  the  sixteenth  century.97  One  consequence  of 
this  policy  was  to  increase  the  variability  or  elasticity  of  local  budgets.  In 
times  of  military  crisis,  county  and  prefectural  governments  needed  to  hire 
more  militiamen  quickly,  which  in  turn  necessitated  a  hike  in  local  taxes 
that  were  paid  in  silver.98 

Similarly,  the  military  grain-transport  system  was  subject  to  larger 
changes  within  the  Ming  economy.  The  late  fifteenth-century  reforms  rep- 
resented a  form  of  monetization.  Prior  to  this  time,  some  farmers  had  been 
responsible  for  transporting  tax  grain  to  the  capital,  a  duty  that  became  far 
more  onerous  when  the  capital  was  moved  to  the  north.  Now,  they  instead 
paid  a  fee  to  local  authorities  and  the  military  moved  the  grain.99  During 
the  sixteenth  century,  the  grain-transport  soldiers  ceased  to  serve  much  if 
any  military  function.  During  the  early  fifteenth  century,  personnel  had 
been  drawn  from  the  pool  of  active-service  garrison  soldiers;  by  the  1430s, 
"supernumerary  soldiers",  the  men  whose  function  was  to  aid  active-service 
soldiers,  were  used  in  large  numbers;  by  1500,  men  completely  outside  the 
hereditary  military  households  were  increasingly  hired  as  replacements. 
This  last  group  of  men  often  comprised  men  who  were  sailors  and  trans- 
port workers  by  trade.  Men  in  the  military  grain-transport  corps  were  not 
expected  to  drill,  nor  were  they  expected  to  be  proficient  with  arms.100 

Finally,  the  monetization  of  the  economy,  including  many  different  kinds 
of  corvee  labor  due  to  the  state,  on  this  scale  in  turn  was  sustainable  only 
through  Ming  China's  integration  into  the  global  economy,  most  particularly 
the  steady  flow  of  silver  from  Spanish  mines  in  the  New  World.101 

95  Estimates  for  wages  are  from  Saeki,  "Min  Shinjidai  no  minso  ni  tsuite",  pp.  53-59.  People's 
stalwarts  might  win  additional  bonuses  for  noteworthy  service  or  be  subject  to  fines  for  failing 
to  meet  their  quotas  of,  for  instance,  smugglers. 

96  Ibid.,  p.  48. 

97  Saeki  Tomi  (ibid.)  suggests  300,000,  while  Liang  Fangzhong  prefers  200,000.  See  Liang, 
"Mingdai  de  minbing",  Zhongguo  shehuijingjishijikan,  5.2  (1937),  pp.  200-234;  reprinted  in  Wu, 
Mingshiyanjiu  luncong,  I,  p.  266. 

98  Huang,  Taxation  and  Governmental  Finance  in  Sixteenth-Century  China,  pp.  111-112, 126. 

99  Lin,  "Mingdai  caojunzhi  chutan",  p.  187. 

100  Ibid.,  pp.  191-192. 

101  The  literature  on  silver  and  the  Ming  economy  is  voluminous.  For  a  convenient  point  of 
entry,  see  Atwell,  "Ming  China  and  the  Emerging  World  Economy". 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


75 


If  changes  in  the  Ming  economy,  particularly  a  trend  toward  monetiza- 
tion,  deeply  shaped  military  labor  relations,  the  highly  fluid  Chinese  military 
labor  market  also  explains  much.  Nearly  all  commentators,  whether  capital 
ministers,  provincial  authorities,  county  magistrates,  or  local  elites,  took 
for  granted  that  substantial  numbers  of  men  could  be  mobilized  quickly  for 
military  service.  When  a  dangerous  princely  revolt  occurred  in  1519,  rather 
than  depend  on  garrison  forces,  the  well-known  literatus  Wang  Yangming 
(1472-1529)  sought  his  troops  locally,  recruiting  2,000  to  3,000  men  from 
small  counties  and  4,000  to  5,000  men  from  large  counties  as  a  way  to  raise 
an  army  quickly.  The  state  provided  provisions  but  the  recruits  supplied 
their  own  weapons.102  During  the  piracy  crisis  of  the  mid-sixteenth  century, 
one  official,  Zheng  Xiao,  offered  the  following  proposal:  "We  should  search 
out  and  recruit  ten  men  who  are  adept  in  martial  arts.  Each  of  them  shall 
instruct  one  hundred  men.  After  one  month,  again  have  each  one  teach  ten 
men.  Thus  we  will  able  to  secure  ten  thousand  men."103  Although  the  official 
expected  that  training  would  be  necessary,  he  had  no  doubt  about  the  pool 
of  men  available.  The  initial  training  in  this  case,  it  should  be  noted,  was 
to  be  provided  neither  by  the  state  nor  by  military  instructors  but  by  hired 
soldiers  already  possessed  of  skills  in  the  martial  arts. 

Similarly,  well-informed  officials  assumed  that  arms  of  the  day,  includ- 
ing bows  and  arrows,  metal-linked  whips,  spears,  cudgels,  and  swords, 
circulated  widely  among  the  subject  population.  Writing  in  the  midst  of 
a  large-scale  rebellion  in  1510,  the  senior  minister  Yang  Yiqing  (1454-1530) 
recommended  that  each  household  in  regions  affected  by  the  rebellion 
keep  these  weapons  at  hand.  Strong  young  men  and  hired  laborers  fulfilling 
their  labor  obligations  toward  the  state  were  to  drill  with  these  weapons. 
Likewise  in  the  late  sixteenth  century,  the  famed  official  Lii  Kun  (1536-1618) 
advocated  regular  drill,  this  time  under  the  instruction  of  professional 
instructors,  in  the  use  of  "spears,  swords,  bows  and  arrows,  short  cudgels, 
rope  whips  and  other  such  weapons"  during  agricultural  slack  periods.104 

Implicit  in  these  various  proposals  was  the  idea  that  the  state  or  its 
local  representatives  could  shed  excess  military  personnel  once  a  crisis 
had  passed.  Although  some  advocated  registering  new  recruits  into  the 
hereditary  military  system,  others  explicitly  rejected  such  a  policy.  Their 
most  common  argument  was  that  permanent  registration  would  undermine 

102  Okuyama,  "Shotoku  Chinko  no  ran  ni  tsuite",  p.  108. 

103  Zheng  Liizhun,  Zheng  Duan jian  gong  nian  pu,  3.22b  (Wanli  edn  held  at  Shanghai  Library; 
reprinted  inSiku  quanshu  cun  mucong shu,  shi 83,  p.  558). 

104  Robinson,  Bandits,  Eunuchs,  and  the  Son  of  Heaven,  p.  95. 


76 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


recruiting  efforts.  Men  were  attracted  by  the  promise  of  cash  and  repelled 
by  permanent  obligation,  they  insisted.105 

Ad  hoc  recruiting  held  appeal  for  several  reasons.  For  local  officials,  it 
provided  a  relatively  high  degree  of  autonomy.  They  could  mobilize  local 
men  without  incurring  long-term  fiscal  responsibilities,  responsibilities 
that  would  have  required  substantial  modification  of  tax  regimes,  which 
in  turn  would  have  meant  negotiation  not  only  with  higher-ups  but  also 
with  local  populations.  Similarly  for  the  central  government,  local  ad  hoc 
recruiting  offered  several  advantages.  It  was  one  way  to  mitigate  the  chal- 
lenges that  great  distances  and  enormous  regional  variation  posed  in  the 
age  before  telegraphs  and  steam-powered  travel.  Local  officials  (or  at  least 
their  staffs)  had  a  surer  sense  of  how  and  where  to  recruit  quickly.  Increasing 
the  number  of  hereditary  military  households  would  have  expanded  an 
already  overstretched  bureaucratic  structure  and,  in  principle,  put  garrison 
authorities  on  the  hook  for  expenses  related  to  medical  care,  assistance  to 
widows  and  orphans  of  fallen  soldiers,  and  stipends  to  the  lame.106  For  better 
or  for  worse,  the  flexible  military  labor  market  saved  the  central  government 
from  the  need  to  push  through  large-scale  fundamental  reforms. 

Critics  of  recruiting  focused  on  concerns  of  finance,  security,  and  govern- 
ance. Officials  frequently  expressed  frustration  that  the  state's  vast  financial 
commitment  to  the  hereditary  military  household  system  was  essentially 
money  down  the  drain.  Hiring  mercenaries  required  additional  funds  on 
top  of  standing  obligations.  These  costs  could  add  up  quickly.  Less  than  one 
year  after  advocating  hiring  martial  artists  as  troops  and  trainers  as  part 
of  an  effort  to  organize  a  force  of  10,000  men,  Zheng  Xiao  expressed  some 
surprise  that  "within  a  week's  time  of  the  pirates  entering  our  jurisdiction, 
we  have  already  used  more  than  9,000  taels  of  silver  for  recruiting  soldiers, 
feeding  them,  paying  out  on  bonuses,  and  providing  rewards".107 

The  ability  of  the  central  government,  county  magistrates,  military 
commanders,  and  even  private  subjects  with  sufficient  social  status  and 

105  In  1431,  a  military  officer  from  the  border  region  of  Shaanxi  suggested  that  men  who  had 
served  in  earlier  military  expeditions  in  the  steppe  be  kept  as  a  kind  of  reserve  force  that  would 
report  monthly  for  drill.  The  court  rejected  his  proposal.  Implicit  in  its  reasoning  was  that,  once 
men  had  completed  their  tour,  the  soldiers  would  return  to  their  original  units  and  civilians 
would  return  to  their  farms  or  herds  (Ming  Xuanzong  shilu,  76.8b). 

106  Sometimes  wages  continued  to  be  issued  to  soldiers  even  after  their  death  on  distant 
battlefields,  usually  because  it  took  some  time  before  garrison  authorities  received  notification 
of  death.  Occasionally  they  tried  (usually  unsuccessfully)  to  make  bereaved  family  members 
repay  such  wages  (Ming  Yingzong  shilu,  36.5a-b). 

107  Zheng  Liizhun,  Zheng  Duan jiangong  nian  pu,  3.35a  (Si ku  quan  shu  cun  mu  cong  shu,  shi  83, 
P-  565)- 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


77 


economic  means  to  recruit  hundreds  or  even  thousands  of  men  quickly  (in 
the  space  of  days  or  weeks)  strongly  suggests  the  existence  of  a  large  pool 
of  young  men  whose  labor  could  be  temporarily  removed  from  agricultural 
production,  animal  husbandry,  artisanal  occupations,  and  other  economic 
activities.  This  situation  is  perhaps  most  profitably  viewed  from  the  per- 
spective of  family  units  rather  than  individuals.  Many  families  pursued 
sophisticated  economic  strategies  of  diversification  designed  to  hedge 
against  risks.  Thus,  although  agricultural  production  might  comprise  the 
core  economic  activity  of  the  family,  individuals  within  the  family  would 
commonly  engage  in  other  activities,  either  full-  or  part-time.  Adult  females 
might  contribute  to  family  production  through  weaving,  peddling  jewelry, 
selling  food  as  small  vendors,  etc.  Adult  males  might  work  for  part  of  the 
year  on  other  people's  farms,  engage  in  commerce,  fish,  hunt,  etc.  Children 
could  serve  as  herders  for  cows  and  sheep  or  help  with  simple  tasks  on  the 
farm.  Thus,  many  households  pursued  diverse  economic  activities  in  a  way 
that  allowed  for  variable  but  relatively  predictable  factors,  such  as  season, 
natural  resources,  and  age,  and  for  other  less  predictable  factors,  such  as 
epidemic,  drought,  warfare,  or  dramatic  changes  in  the  composition  of  the 
household. 

Thus  short-time  service  in  the  military  was  one  element  of  a  larger 
strategy  of  economic  diversification  pursued  at  the  level  of  individual 
households  or  groups  of  households  linked  through  kinship  and  or  marriage. 
Young  men  might  serve  for  a  single  "tour"  of  several  months  or  might  serve 
periodically  over  a  more  extended  period  of  time  depending  on  demand 
within  the  military  labor  market. 

The  dynamic  for  men  who  served  as  mercenaries  for  longer  periods 
of  time  differed  in  several  important  ways.  Although  such  men,  too,  are 
best  understood  in  the  context  of  larger  family  economic  strategies,  their 
absence  was  generally  more  enduring.  Detailed  documentary  material 
related  to  their  contributions  to  larger  family  units  is  limited,  but  evidence 
from  men  serving  in  hereditary  military  households  would  suggest  that  time 
and  distance  often  weakened  economic  ties  to  larger  family  units.  To  the 
degree  that  "housemen"  became  long-term  retainers,  it  seems  likely  (but 
far  from  certain)  that  regular,  substantial  contributions  to  their  original 
household  may  have  diminished.  An  initial  study  of  one  region  famed  in  the 
sixteenth  century  as  a  source  of  military  labor,  Yiwu  County,  indicates  that 
military  service  dramatically  influenced  local  demographics.  "Most  young 
men  in  Yiwu",  wrote  one  sixteenth-century  observer,  "have  given  up  their 
original  trade,  responded  to  recruiting  drives,  and  joined  the  army".  Local 


78 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


officials  complained  that  the  resultant  dearth  of  young  men  impinged  on 
their  ability  to  secure  sufficient  labor  for  government  needs.108 

As  noted  above,  the  conditions  of  service  of  "household  men"  varied 
significantly,  from  fairly  straightforward  short-term  arrangements  whereby 
they  received  cash  for  military  labor,  to  long-term  arrangements  that 
involved  accompanying  their  employer  to  new  assignments  or  even  into 
retirement.  Presumably  long-term  arrangements  involved  more  than  a 
simple  economic  transaction:  feelings  of  personal  loyalty,  an  identification 
with  other  men  serving  under  the  patron,  and  perhaps  the  adoption  of  fic- 
tive  kinship  or  oaths  of  brotherhood.  Such  behaviors  no  doubt  also  shaped 
the  identity  of  those  soldiers  serving  in  regular  garrison  forces. 

In  addition  to  (a)  economic  changes  and  (b)  supply  and  demand  in  the 
labor  market,  ideological  or  political  considerations  also  shaped  military 
labor  relations  during  the  Ming.  More  specifically,  the  Ming  state  considered 
the  hereditary  military  household  system  and  imperial  garrisons  essential 
to  the  maintenance  of  the  empire.  The  great  physical  size,  geographic 
variation,  ethnic  complexity,  and  economic  diversity  of  China  generated 
considerable  centrifugal  force.  Given  such  centrifugal  pressure,  the  Ming 
state  went  to  considerable  lengths  to  ensure  the  viability  of  the  dynasty  by 
strengthening  the  centre.  Thorough  control  of  the  military  and  the  many 
functions  built  into  the  hereditary  military  household  system  were  essential 
to  such  efforts. 

The  Ming  founder  used  various  methods  to  prevent  his  generals  from 
gaining  sufficient  power  to  challenge  the  court.  Generals  were  assigned 
command  of  garrison  units  for  specific  campaigns.  Once  the  fighting  was 
concluded,  the  generals  were  to  be  recalled  to  the  capital  or  to  their  positions 
on  the  border.109  The  founder  divided  the  highest  level  of  military  command 
into  five  military  commissions  to  prevent  an  undue  concentration  of  power 
in  the  hands  of  single  man  or  institution.  He  also  killed  many  of  his  leading 
generals  during  sanguinary  purges  that  left  tens  of  thousands  dead. 

The  hereditary  garrison  system,  too,  was  a  critical  instrument  of  central 
control.  Ultimate  responsibility  for  household  registration  of  military 
families  was  in  the  hands  of  the  central  government.  The  court  dispatched 
officials  to  local  garrisons  to  track  down  or  replace  deserting  (or  deceased) 
soldiers.  Enormous  swathes  of  territory  were  turned  over  to  the  garrisons 

108  Nimick,  "Ch'i  Chi-kuang  and  I-wu  County",  p.  24. 

109  The  prominent  official  He  Qiaoxin  considered  this  as  one  of  the  founder's  six  greatest 
accomplishments  as  a  ruler  ("Di  wang  gong  de",  in  He,  He  Wen  su  gong  wen  ji,  2.24a,  1694  edn; 
reprinted  in  Taibei:  Weiwen  tushu  chubanshe,  1976, 1,  p.  109). 


MILITARY  LABOR  IN  CHINA,  C.  1500 


79 


for  farming.  The  central  government  retained  control  over  the  lands,  the 
men  who  farmed  them,  their  harvests,  and  granaries.  The  central  govern- 
ment exiled  criminals  to  serve  as  soldiers  in  garrisons,  especially  along  the 
borders.  During  the  early  decades  of  the  dynasty,  the  garrison  system  was 
the  mechanism  through  which  the  central  government  forcibly  relocated 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  men,  women,  and  children  from  one  part  of  the 
empire  to  others  (as  part  of  economic  reconstruction).  Further,  it  was  the 
tool  through  which  the  court  tried  to  keep  them  there  on  a  permanent  basis. 
When  the  state  first  approved  measures  to  hire  soldiers  from  within  and 
beyond  hereditary  military  households,  it  initially  tried  to  limit  the  pool 
to  men  who  could  demonstrate  evidence  of  proper  household  registration.110 

Thus,  although  officials  in  the  central  government  were  fully  aware  of  the 
monetization  of  parts  of  the  economy,  the  flexibility  of  the  military  labor 
market,  and  the  viability  of  hiring  soldiers  to  defend  the  dynasty,  there  is 
little  evidence  that  abolition  of  the  hereditary  military  household  system 
or  the  imperial  garrisons  was  ever  given  serious  consideration.  In  the  case 
of  the  Ming  dynasty,  maintenance  of  the  hereditary  military  household 
system  was  integral  to  imperial  power  and  legitimacy.  This  involved  a 
measure  of  irony.  The  Ming  court  had  adopted  the  hereditary  military 
household  system  from  the  Mongol  Yuan  dynasty,  a  regime  that  the  early 
Ming  emperors  spent  considerable  time  decrying  as  abusive,  corrupt,  and 
fundamentally  incompatible  with  the  enduring  values  and  customs  of 
Chinese  civilization. 

Thus,  several  factors  shaped  the  particular  configuration  of  military 
labor  relations  under  the  Ming.  Insofar  as  dynastic  legitimacy  became 
entwined  with  strong  control  over  military  resources  and  the  Ming  wished 
to  be  considered  a  successor  to  the  Yuan,  the  hereditary  military  household 
system  and  its  vast  array  of  garrisons  owed  much  to  ideological  factors.111 
One  might  argue  that  the  Ming  state's  use  of  Mongol,  Jurchen,  Yao,  and 
other  non-Chinese  warriors  could  be  explained  in  similar  terms.  The  initial 
emergence  of  hired  soldiers  in  the  fifteenth  century  and  more  especially 
their  proliferation  during  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries  must  be 
understood  in  the  wider  context  of  socioeconomic  changes  transforming 
China.  The  growing,  if  still  uneven,  use  of  silver  as  a  medium  of  exchange, 

no  Li  Du  (Mingdai huangquan  zhengzhiyanjiu,  pp.  152-226)  stresses  the  central  government's 
high  level  of  control.  Li  notes  the  initial  efforts  to  recruit  only  from  among  properly  registered 
men  in  "Mingdai  mubingzhi  jianlun",  p.  66. 

111  For  the  Ming  court  as  a  successor  to  the  Yuan,  see  Robinson,  "The  Ming  Imperial  Family 
and  the  Yuan  Legacy". 


80 


DAVID  M.  ROBINSON 


the  monetization  of  labor  and  material  obligations  to  the  state,  and  the 
decline  of  the  hereditary  occupation  household  system  all  contributed  to 
conditions  favoring  hired  soldiers.  Finally,  the  large  and  flexible  military 
labor  market  must  be  mentioned.  It  arose  as  a  result  of  the  socioeconomic 
conditions  enumerated  above,  a  steadily  growing  population  (including 
the  population  of  young,  often  single  men),  diversified  economic  strategies 
pursued  by  individual  families  and  lineages,  and  competition  for  military 
labor  by  the  imperial  state,  local  authorities,  private  elites,  and  other  groups 
ranging  from  mutual-aid  societies  among  farmers,  men  of  force,  bandits, 
pirates,  and  rebels.  This  competition  for  military  labor  almost  certainly 
contributed  to  its  commodification. 


From  the  mamluks  to  the  mansabdars 


A  social  history  of  military  service  in  South  Asia,  c.  1500  to 
c.  16501 

Kaushik  Roy 
Introduction 

By  the  first  decade  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  Delhi  Sultanate  (1206-1526), 
the  dominant  power  in  north  India,  was  breaking  up.  Several  autonomous 
states  emerged  to  challenge  the  political  supremacy  of  the  Delhi  Sultanate 
in  the  Ganga-Jamuna  doab  (the  fertile  tract  of  land  between  the  rivers 
Ganga  and  Jamuna  in  north  India).  Deccan  (the  region  between  the  rivers 
Godavari  and  Krishna)  and  south  India  had  become  independent  of  the 
Delhi  Sultanate's  control  earlier  during  the  mid-fourteenth  century.  The 
invasion  of  India  by  the  Turkish  warlord  Zahir-ud-din  Muhammad  Babur 
in  1526  resulted  in  the  replacement  of  the  Lodi  dynasty  ruling  the  Delhi 
Sultanate  with  the  Mogul  Empire.  The  Moguls  (Mughals;  the  nineteenth- 
century  British  officials  and  historians  called  them  Moghuls)  referred  to 
themselves  as  Chagatai  Turks  or  Timurids  even  though  their  family  links 
with  the  Chagatai  branch  of  the  Chingizids  were  weak.  The  Moguls  claimed 
that  from  their  father's  side  they  descended  from  Amir  Timur  and  from  their 
mother's  side  from  the  Chagatai  Mongol  branch.  The  newly  born  Mogul 
Empire  was  overthrown  in  1540  by  the  Afghan  warlord  from  east  India 
named  Sher  Shah  Suri.  Babur's  son  Humayun  staged  a  comeback  in  1555. 

The  "real"  founder  of  the  Mogul  Empire  was  indeed  Akbar  (Padshah,  i.e. 
emperor,  from  1556  to  1605).  Akbar  put  an  end  to  the  political  chaos  in  north 
India  by  subduing  the  Afghans  and  the  Rajputs.  Further,  he  reorganized  the 
administration.  By  the  time  of  Akbar's  death  in  1605,  the  Mogul  Empire  had 
established  a  stable  administrative  machinery  in  north  and  central  India 
and  was  in  the  process  of  moving  slowly  into  Deccan.  Until  the  fourteenth 
century,  the  dominant  mode  of  military  recruitment  in  India  was  the 
mamluk  system.  The  mamluks  were  slave  soldiers  of  the  Muslim  world. 
However,  by  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century,  due  to  Akbari  reorganization, 
a  sort  of  quasi-mercenary-cum-quasi-professional  military  employment 

1  lam  indebted  to  Suhrita  and  Prof.  Erik-Jan  Ziircher  for  their  comments  on  an  earlier  version 
of  this  paper. 


82 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


known  as  the  mansabdari  system  became  dominant.  The  beginning  of  the 
seventeenth  century  witnessed  the  gradual  expansion  of  Mogul  power  into 
Deccan  under  Akbar's  son  and  grandson,  named  Jahangir  (r.  1605-1627)  and 
Shahjahan  (r.  1628-1658)  respectively.  They  continued  to  operate  within  the 
administrative  fabric  established  by  their  illustrious  predecessor.  By  the 
mid-seventeenth  century,  two  contradictory  processes  were  unfolding  in 
the  subcontinent.  While  the  Mogul  Empire  under  the  dynamic  leadership 
of  Emperor  Aurangzeb  (1658-1707)  was  poised  for  expansion,  simultaneously 
the  administrative  institutions  established  by  Akbar  were  slowly  becoming 
dysfunctional.  This  was  partly  because  the  Mogul  economy  was  in  the  grip 
of  what  is  known  as  the  "agrarian  crisis"2  and  partly  due  to  the  new  forms 
of  warfare  introduced  by  the  Marathas  and  the  Persians. 


Research  design 

The  focus  in  this  chapter  is  on  the  combatants  of  the  Mogul  army.  I  will  show 
how  the  mamluk  system  became  dominant  and  explain  the  reasons  which 
led  to  its  demise  in  South  Asia.  The  various  factors  that  resulted  in  the  transi- 
tion to  the  mansabdari  system  and  the  existence  of  other  mini-systems 
will  be  laid  out.  Since  the  Mogul  army  was  not  frozen  in  time  but  evolved 
over  two  centuries,  the  transition  to  different  forms  of  military  labour  is 
portrayed  chronologically.  This  chapter  combines  original  research  with  a 
synthesis  of  the  existing  materials  and  has  a  comparative  focus.  I  will  com- 
pare the  mamluk  and  mansabdari  systems  alongside  other  forms  of  military 
profession  which  were  in  vogue  in  the  subcontinent  between  1500  and  1650. 

2  The  agrarian  crisis  was  an  amalgam  of  structural  and  managerial  factors.  Long-term 
agricultural  decline,  price  rises,  etc.  resulted  in  a  decrease  in  income  from  jagirs  (agricultural 
land  assigned  to  the  Mogul  officials)  from  the  late  seventeenth  century  onwards.  The  deficit 
budget  of  the  Mogul  central  government  -  due  to  continuous  warfare  in  Deccan  against  the 
Marathas  as  well  as  to  the  rising  cost  of  warfare  -  forced  Aurangzeb  to  requisition  jagirs  from 
the  Mogul  nobles  (officials),  which  were  then  transferred  into  the  khalisa  (land  under  direct 
crown  management).  In  addition,  newly  conquered  land  was  not  assigned  as  jagirs  among 
the  nobility  but  put  under  khalisa.  Aurangzeb  hoped,  through  this  measure,  that  the  central 
government  would  be  able  to  exercise  greater  financial  control  over  the  agrarian  economy.  A 
lack  of  jagirs  for  assignment  to  the  Mogul  nobles  caused  be-jagiri  or  a  paibaqi  crisis  among  the 
Mogul  nobility.  This  scenario  resulted  in  increasing  factional  fighting  among  the  nobility  trying 
to  acquire  the  available  jagirs  in  the  Mogul  Empire.  After  the  death  of  Aurangzeb  in  1707,  the 
powerful  nobles,  in  a  bid  to  get  hold  of  the jagirs,  became  independent  of  the  Mogul  centre  and 
carved  out  semi-autonomous  principalities  for  themselves  and  their  followers.  In  the  long  run 
this  resulted  in  the  dismemberment  of  the  Mogul  Empire.  See  Habib,  The  Agrarian  System  of 
Mughal  India;  and  Chandra,  Parties  and  Politics  at  the  Mughal  Court. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


83 


This  is  necessary  because  both  the  mamluk  and  the  mansabdari  systems 
emerged  in  interaction  with  various  local/regional  forms  of  military  labour 
service  in  medieval  South  Asia.  Again  the  timeline  is  not  rigid  because,  to 
explain  the  rise  and  fall  of  the  various  forms  of  military  recruitment  at 
different  times,  we  have  to  consider  the  years  both  before  1500  and  after 
1650.  In  order  to  assess  the  uniqueness  or  lack  thereof  as  regards  the  social 
history  of  South  Asian  military  labourers,  some  comparisons  will  be  made 
with  the  military  systems  that  were  operational  in  other  parts  of  the  world. 
Let  us  now  explore  the  existing  modern  works  on  the  subject. 

Historiography  of  military  labour  history  of  medieval  South  Asia 

Military  history  is  neglected  in  the  South  Asian  academic  field  due  to  the 
dominance  of  Marxism  and,  more  recently,  post-modernism.  We  have  a  few 
books  on  the  military  history  of  medieval  India.  The  earliest  modern  work 
on  the  Mogul  army  is  by  the  British  historian  of  colonial  India,  William 
Irvine.  He  argues  that  Indian  "racial  inferiority"  resulted  in  continuous 
treachery,  infighting,  and  backbiting,  and  that  this  racial/cultural  trait 
prevented  the  Moguls  from  constructing  a  bureaucratic  professional  stand- 
ing army  capable  of  waging  decisive  battles  and  sieges.3  The  latest  work  on 
the  Mogul  army  by  a  Dutch  historian,  Jos  Gommans,  asserts  that  the  Mogul 
army  was  not  geared  for  decisive  confrontations  aimed  at  destroying  the 
enemy.  Rather,  the  Mogul  grand  strategy  was  to  absorb  potential  enemies 
within  the  loose  structure  of  the  Mogul  Empire.  The  Mogul  army  functioned 
as  an  instrument  to  frighten,  coerce,  and  deter  enemies.4 

We  have  a  crop  of  biographies  of  medieval  warlords,  rulers,  and  nobles, 
which  deal  with  their  administrative  and  military  activities.  The  decline  of 
the  Delhi  Sultanate  started  under  Sultan  Firoz  Shah  Tughluq.  R.C.  Jauhri's 
biography  of  Firoz  is  still  useful.5  The  best  biography  of  Babur  for  political 
and  military  affairs  remains  that  by  the  British  historian  Stanley  Lane-Poole, 
who  wrote  in  the  last  year  of  the  nineteenth  century.6  The  most  recent  biog- 
raphy of  Babur  by  Stephen  F.  Dale  concentrates  mostly  on  political  culture.7 
The  standard  biography  of  Akbar  remains  the  one  written  by  Vincent  Smith, 

3  Irvine,  The  Army  of  the  Indian  Moghuls. 

4  Gommans,  Mughal  Warfare. 

5  Jauhri,  Firoz  Tughluq. 

6  Lane-Poole,  The  Emperor  Babar. 

7  Dale,  The  Garden  of  the  Eight  Paradises. 


84 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


a  British  civil  servant  in  colonial  India.8  The  best  biographer  of  Aurangzeb, 
the  last  great  Mogul,  is  Jadunath  Sarkar.9  On  Sher  Shah  Suri,  the  founder  of 
the  short-lived  Afghan  Suri  Sultanate,  there  are  two  good  biographies.10  As 
regards  the  biographies  of  the  warlords,  one  example  is  Radhey  Shyam's 
biography  of  the  Ahmadnagar  Sultanate's  slave-turned-warlord,  Malik 
Ambar,  who  later  fought  against  the  Moguls."  We  have  a  good  biography 
of  Mir  Jumla,  the  famous  noble  of  Aurangzeb.12  Most  of  these  biographies 
follow  the  "history-from-the-top-down"  approach  and  give  detailed  narrative 
accounts  of  the  "great  men".  However,  some  data  regarding  the  social  aspects 
of  military  employments  can  be  gathered  from  these  biographies. 

The  principal  debate  in  the  field  is  about  weak  states  and  flower/ritual 
warfare13  versus  strong  states,  standing  armies,  and  decisive  battles.  Most 
modern  non-Indian  scholars  (Dirk  Kolff,  Gommans,  Andre  Wink,  Doug- 
las Streusand,  Burton  Stein,  Lome  Adamson,  Stephen  Peter  Rosen,  etc.) 
argue  that  the  Mogul  state  was  a  shadowy  structure.  The  imperial  fabric 
comprised  innumerable  semi-autonomous  principalities  held  together  by 
the  personality  of  the  emperor  and  the  pomp  and  splendour  of  the  Mogul 
durbar  (court).  The  emperor  did  not  enjoy  a  monopoly  of  violence  in  the 
public  sphere.  The  Moguls  lacked  a  drilled  and  disciplined  standing  army  for 
crushing  opponents  on  the  battlefields.  Treachery,  diplomacy,  bribery,  and  a 
show  of  force  resulted  in  the  absorption  and  assimilation  of  enemies.14  What 
Irvine  has  categorized  as  Indian  racial  inferiority  had  been  transformed 
as  the  unique  culture  of  the  "Orientals"  in  the  paradigm  of  these  modern 
scholars. 

In  contrast,  John  F.  Richards15  and  many  of  the  Indian  Muslim  historians 
who  are  influenced  by  Marxism  and  belong  to  a  group  which  can  be  labelled 
the  Aligarh  School,  assert  that  the  Mogul  Empire  was  a  centralized  agrarian 

8  Smith,  Akbar. 

9  Sarkar  wrote  a  five-volume  biography  of  Aurangzeb,  and  an  abridged  version  in  one  volume 
was  later  published  (A  Short  History  of Aurangzib). 

10  Aquil,  Sufism,  Culture,  and  Politics;  Matta,  Sher  Shah  Suri. 
n    Shyam,  Life  and  Times  of  Malik  Ambar. 

12  Sarkar,  The  Life  of  Mir fumla. 

13  Flower/ritual  warfare  means  indecisive  skirmishing,  pillaging,  and  plundering,  etc.  The 
objective  of  such  warfare  is  not  destruction  of  the  enemy  but  to  cause  harm  so  that  the  defeated 
enemy,  with  its  militia,  could  be  co-opted  into  the  victor's  camp. 

14  Adamson,  "The  Mughal  Armies";  Gommans,  Mughal  Warfare;  Streusand,  The  Formation 
of  the  Mughal  Empire;Wink,  Al-Hind:  The  Making  of  the  Indo-lslamic  World,  II,  The  Slave  Kings 
and  the  Islamic  Conquest;  Rosen,  Societies  and  Military  Power;  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  "A 
Millennium  of  Stateless  Indian  History?" 

15  Richards,  The  Mughal  Empire,  p.  xv. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


85 


bureaucratic  polity.  The  Aligarh  School  turns  the  limelight  on  the  agrarian 
economy;  focusing  on  the  revenue  documents,  they  argue  that  the  Moguls' 
ability  to  claim  about  50  per  cent  of  the  gross  produce  from  the  land  proves 
that  they  had  a  strong  presence  at  the  regional/local  level.  The  sucking  of 
economic  surplus  from  the  countryside  was  aided  by  the  military  supremacy 
of  the  Moguls,  exemplified  by  the  use  of  cavalry  and  gunpowder  weapons.16 
However,  M.  Athar  Ali  notes  that,  unlike  the  Tudor  state,  the  Mogul  state 
lacked  the  capability  and  the  intention  to  legislate.17  Probably  the  nature 
of  the  Mogul  state  and  Mogul  warfare  lies  somewhere  in  between  the  two 
extreme  viewpoints  discussed  above.  Now,  let  us  review  the  primary  sources 
which  are  our  raw  materials  for  piecing  together  the  social  history  of  the 
various  forms  of  military  employment  in  Mogul  South  Asia. 

Review  of  the  primary  sources 

Most  of  the  sources  generated  by  the  Mogul  chroniclers  are  in  Persian. 
Very  few  people  in  the  world  can  read  Persian  calligraphy  of  the  medieval 
manuscripts  which  are  scattered  in  the  various  museums  and  libraries  of  the 
world.  Luckily  most  of  these  works  have  been  translated  into  English.  Various 
regional  courts  in  the  Mogul  Empire  generated  chronicles  and  poems  in  ver- 
nacular languages  such  as  Hindi,  Rajasthani,  Marathi  (modi  script),  Punjabi 
(Gurmukhi  script),  and  Bengali  (charjapada).  These  scripts  vary  from  the 
present-day  scripts,  and  not  all  the  vernacular  sources  have  been  translated. 
For  reconstructing  the  cultural  ethos  of  the  Rajputs,  who  fought  the  Islamic 
armies  and  at  times  also  joined  them,  Prithvirajvijayamahakavya  is  of  some 
help.  This  poem,  composed  by  Jayanak,  comprises  1,067  sbkas  (stanzas).18 
Somadeva  Bhatta's  collection  of  poems,  known  as  Kathasaritsagara,19  com- 
posed around  500  CE,  offers  a  glimpse  of  the  warrior  ethos  of  the  Hindu 
mercenaries.  In  this  regard,  the  various  Sanskrit  nitisastras  (legal  literature 
such  as  Arthasastra,  Nitiprakasika,  Sukraniti)  are  of  some  use. 

One  of  the  principal  sources  for  our  purposes  is  the  memoir  of  the  first 
Mogul  emperor,  Babur.  Babur  wrote  his  autobiography  in  Turkish  with  the 
title  Tuzuk-i-Baburi,  which  was  translated  into  Persian  as  Babur-Nama.  A.S. 

16  Habib,  Akbar  and  His  India;  Ali,  Mughal  India;Hasan,  Religion,  State,  and  Society  in  Medieval 
India. 

17  Ali,  "Political  Structures  of  the  Islamic  Orient  in  the  Sixteenth  and  Seventeenth  Centuries", 
P-  95- 

18  Subsequent  translations  are  by  the  author. 

19  All  translations  are  by  the  author. 


86 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


Beveridge  translated  it  into  English  in  two  volumes.  While  the  first  volume 
deals  with  Babur's  adventures  in  Central  Asia,  the  second  volume  narrates 
Babur's  activities  in  Hindustan  (north  India).  Babur's  great-grandson  Jahan- 
gir  (r.  1605-1628)  also  wrote  an  autobiography.20  An  intimate  biographical 
account  of  Babur's  son  Humayun  is  available  in  a  narrative  written  by  the 
latter's  domestic  attendant,  Jouher.21  The  Maathir-ul-Umara,  a  collective 
biography  of  730  Mogul  nobles  by  Nawab  Samsam-ud-Daulah  Shah  Nawaz 
Khan  and  written  between  1768  and  1780,  is  an  important  source.  This  work 
has  been  translated  by  H.  Beveridge  into  English  into  two  volumes.22  Shah 
Nawaz  Khan's  objective  is  to  give  "an  account,  in  alphabetical  order,  of  the 
lives  of  the  great  amirs  and  exalted  nobles  -  some  of  whom  had,  at  the  time 
of  their  glory,  by  dint  of  fortune  and  good  conduct,  been  the  authors  of  great 
deeds  [...]  while  others  had,  by  the  wind  of  their  arrogance  and  presumption, 
heaped  up  final  ruin  for  themselves".23  In  Akbar's  reign,  the  highest  rank 
to  which  an  amir  (noble)  could  aspire  was  that  of  5,000  sawars,  meaning 
that  he  was  supposed  to  maintain  5,000  cavalry.  However,  a  few  people 
attained  the  rank  of  7,000  sawars.  These  higher  ranks  were  held  mostly 
by  the  royal  princes.  Under  Shah  Jahan  and  Aurangzeb,  mansabdars24  of 
3,000  possessed  their  own  drums  and  flags.  A  noble  holding  the  rank  of  500 
was  of  considerable  importance.  Hence,  Shah  Nawaz  Khan  writes,  he  has 
included  the  biographies  of  nobles  who  held  the  mansab  of  the  rank  of  500 
and  upwards.25  For  details  of  Akbar's  reign,  the  best  source  is  Akbar-Nama 
by  Akbar's  courtier  Abul  Fazl.26  Abul  Fazl's  Ain-i-Akbari  is  a  statistical  and 
ethnographic  study  of  the  Mogul  Empire.  For  Shah  Jahan's  reign,  we  have 
Inayat  Khan's  Shah  Jahan  Nama.27  For  abridged  translations  of  the  various 
medieval  Persian  works  dealing  with  India,  the  eight  volumes  of  H.M.  Elliot 
and  John  Dawson's  History  of  India  remain  useful.28 

The  problem  with  the  Persian  sources  is  that  they  were  written  by  the 
elites  for  the  elites,  i.e.  mostly  the  relatives  of  mansabdars  for  the  mansab- 

20  The  Jahangirnama. 

21  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat. 

22  The  Maathir-ul-Umara.  See  also  I,  p.  32. 

23  Ibid.,  I,  p.  7. 

24  A  Mogul  official  who  held  a  mansab  (rank)  in  lieu  of  jagirs  was  known  as  a  mansabdar.  In 
accordance  with  his  rank,  he  had  to  maintain  a  military  contingent,  which  he  did  out  of  the 
revenues  of  the  jagirs  assigned  to  him. 

25  The  Maathir-ul-  Umara,  I,  p.  8. 

26  The  Akbar-Nama  was  first  completed  in  1596. 

27  Shah  Jahan  Nama  of  Inayat  Khan,  ed.  by  Begley  and  Desai. 

28  The  History  of  India  as  told  by  its  own  Historians. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


87 


dars.29  The  court  chroniclers  and  the  nobles  who  wrote  while  enjoying  the 
patronage  of  the  rulers  concentrated  mostly  on  the  doings  of  the  durbar 
and  not  on  those  lower  placed.  Hence,  we  can  recreate  the  picture  about  the 
officer  corps  (especially  the  senior  ranks)  of  the  Mogul  army  but  we  know 
very  little  about  the  rank  and  file.  And  the  common  soldiers  have  left  us  with 
no  written  materials.  Let  us  now  look  at  the  forms  of  military  employment 
which  were  in  vogue  in  the  subcontinent  when  the  Moguls  arrived. 


The  rise  and  fall  of  the  mamluk  system,  c.  1200-1399 

The  Delhi  Sultanate  depended  on  irregular  troops  (mercenaries  and  retain- 
ers of  the  tributary  chieftains)  and  regular  soldiers  (ghulams,  i.e.,  slaves  plus 
soldiers  raised  and  maintained  by  the  iqtadars)?0  The  irregular  troops  were 
assembled  during  campaigns  and  other  emergencies  (civil  wars,  invasion  by 
foreign  powers,  etc.)  and  the  regular  troops  were  maintained  throughout 
the  year  as  a  sort  of  standing  army. 

The  early  rulers  of  the  Delhi  Sultanate,  such  as  Muhammad  Ghori, 
Qutub-ud-din  Aibak  and  Iltutmish  (or  Altamash,  sultan  from  1211  to  1236), 
were  influenced  by  the  ghulam/mamluk  system  which  was  prevalent  in 
the  Middle  East.  For  inspiration  and  a  model  to  follow,  these  three  sultans 
looked  at  the  political  and  military  system  prevalent  in  the  Caliphate  and 
in  the  other  Muslim  polities  of  the  Middle  East.  The  mamluk  institution 
first  came  into  existence  during  the  first  half  of  the  ninth  century,  under 
the  Abbasid  Caliphate.31  Peter  Jackson  writes  that  by  the  eleventh  century 
Turkish  slave  regiments  were  prevalent  in  the  polities  of  Transoxiana, 
Turkestan,  Persia  (Iran),  and  the  Near  East.32  The  shock  troops  and  the 
core  of  the  Delhi  Sultanate's  army  comprised  mounted  Turkish  ghulams. 
Many  of  the  sultans,  such  as  Aibak,  Iltutmish,  Balban  (r.  1266-1287),  and 
so  forth,  started  their  careers  as  ghulams.  Firoz  Shah  Tughluq  (r.  1351-1388) 
maintained  180,000  slaves,  of  whom  40,000  served  in  the  army.  Some  slaves 


29  Abul  Fazl  himself  was  a  mansabdar  holding  the  rank  of  4,000:  The  History  of  India,  Elliot 
and  Dawson,  VI,  Akbar-Nama  of  Abul  Fazl,  p.  2. 

30  An  iqtadarwas  the  holder  of  an  iqta  (a  piece  of  land).  The  revenue  of  the  iqta  went  to  support 
the  cavalry  force  of  the  iqtadar. 

31  Jackson,  "The  Mamluk  Institution  in  Early  Muslim  India",  p.  340. 

32  Jackson,  "Turkish  Slaves  on  Islam's  Indian  Frontier",  pp.  64-65. 


88 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


specialized  in  archery,  others  in  swordsmanship,  and  so  on.  The  slaves  were 
occasionally  paid  in  cash,  but  usually  through jagirs.33 

Next  in  importance  were  the  contingents  of  the  iqtadars.  The  nobles  were 
granted  land,  i.e.,  iqtas  (the  equivalent  of  jagirs),  for  maintaining  cavalry 
troopers.  The  iqtadars  (holder  of  iqtas)  paid  the  soldiers  under  their  com- 
mand out  of  the  revenues  collected  from  their  iqtas.34  Initially,  the  iqtas  were 
granted  not  to  the  Hindu  chieftains  but  to  the  Turkish  nobles.  The  iqtadars 
and  their  soldiers  (who  were  their  kinsmen)35  joined  military  service  for 
material  gain.  However,  it  would  be  wrong  to  categorize  them  as  mercenar- 
ies, because  their  military  employment  depended  on  the  political  fortunes 
of  the  sultan.  If  a  particular  sultan  was  overthrown,  his  favourite  iqtadars 
were  replaced  by  nobles  who  supported  the  cause  of  the  victor.  The  iqtadari 
system  was  not  professional  because  the  iqtas  were  given  for  life;  when  the 
regular  soldiers  grew  old,  they  remained  in  the  ranks,  and  after  their  death 
their  male  relations  inherited  their  posts.36  The  iqta  system  was  a  technique 
of  rewarding  the  free-born  Turkish  nobles  who  constituted  the  support 
base  of  the  Delhi  sultans.  In  the  absence  of  a  bureaucracy,  the  nobles  were 
installed  as  iqtadars  directly  into  the  countryside,  where  their  function  was 
to  collect  any  agricultural  surplus.  With  the  passage  of  time,  especially  under 
the  Khaljis  and  the  Lodis,  iqtas  were  granted  to  the  non-Turkish  Muslims 
for  broadening  the  support  base  of  the  Delhi  Sultanate.  To  an  extent,  the 
iqtas  were  somewhat  equivalent  to  timars  and  the  iqtadari  cavaliers  were 
somewhat  similar  to  timariots  (sipahis)  of  the  Ottoman  Army.37 

However,  shifts  in  the  international  balance  of  power,  as  well  as  the 
enormous  demographic  resources  of  the  subcontinent,  encouraged  the  Delhi 
Sultanate  to  change  the  ethnic  composition  of  the  ghulams  and  to  depend  on 
the  free-floating  armed  mercenaries  of  Hindustan.  Initially,  the  Delhi  Sul- 
tanate relied  on  Turkish  slaves  to  fill  the  ghulam  units.  The  Mongol  invasions 
of  Central  Asia,  Afghanistan,  and  Iran  resulted  in  the  Delhi  Sultanate  being 
completely  cut  off  from  the  manpower  supplies  of  the  extra-Indian  Islamic 
world.  The  cessation  of  the  flow  of  Turkish  and  Afghan  manpower  forced  the 
Delhi  sultans  to  enslave  Hindu  boys  and  convert  them  to  Islam;  they  were 
then  inducted  into  the  ranks  of ghulams.  This  process  was  somewhat  similar 
to  the  Ottoman  practice  of  capturing  young  Christian  boys  in  the  Balkans 

33  Jauhri,  Firoz  Tughluq,  pp.  126-128;  Jackson,  "The  Mamluk  Institution  in  Early  Muslim  India", 
PP-  341,  357- 

34  Jauhri,  Firoz  Tughluq,  pp.  86, 118. 

35  Hasan,  "Aspects  of  State  and  Religion  in  Medieval  India",  p.  65. 

36  Jauhri,  Firoz  Tughluq,  p.  120. 

37  Aksan,  "Ottoman  War  and  Warfare",  p.  150. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


89 


who  were,  after  their  forcible  conversion  into  Islam,  inducted  as  janissaries. 
The  Delhi  Sultanate  was  faced  simultaneously  with  Mongol  challenges  in 
Sind  and  Punjab;38  within  South  Asia,  the  Rajput  chieftains  started  to  nibble 
away  at  the  internal  frontiers  of  the  Sultanate.39  One  way  to  maintain  and 
expand  the  size  of  the  army  was  to  hire  indigenous  mercenaries  as  well  as 
to  utilize  the  forces  of  the  defeated  chiefs.  The  free-floating  mercenaries 
had  their  own  horses,  armour,  and  equipment.  They  were  paid  in  cash  and 
they  also  had  a  right  to  the  loot  taken  from  the  defeated  enemies.  Unlike  the 
ghulams  and  the  iqtadari  soldiers,  the  mercenaries  were  employed  either 
for  a  single  season  only  or  during  emergencies. 

In  1353,  when  Firoz  Tughluq  marched  from  Delhi  towards  Bengal  with 
70,000  soldiers,  many  Hindu  chieftains  who  had  stopped  paying  tribute 
joined  him  with  their  war  bands.40  These  chieftains  with  their  warriors 
(who  belonged  to  the  same  religion  and  mobilized  through  the  territorial 
clan  network)  were  forced  to  join  the  sultanate's  expeditionary  armies  and 
were  not  remunerated  in  any  way.  It  was  a  sort  of  begari  (forced  unpaid 
labour)  and  could  be  categorized  as  a  case  of  an  ethnic  tributary  form  of 
military  employment. 

During  the  1365  Thatta  (Sind)  campaign,  Firoz,  as  well  as  depending  on 
the  ghulams  and  iqtadari  troops,  also  recruited  the  free-floating  mercenar- 
ies. They  were  paid  40  per  cent  of  their  salaries  in  advance.  After  Firoz  was 
repulsed  in  Sind,  he  prepared  another  army  for  a  second  campaign  against 
Sind  during  1366-1367.  In  addition  to  mobilizing  the  soldiers  of  the  iqtadars, 
Firoz  hired  mercenaries.  The  mercenaries  were  paid  three-fifths  of  their 
salaries  in  advance  so  that  they  could  equip  themselves.  The  personnel  of 
the  standing  army  during  this  campaign  also  received  payment  in  cash. 
This  was  possible  as  there  were  various  types  of  gold  and  silver  coins  in 
circulation  in  Firoz's  time.  In  fact,  the  whole  revenue  of  Gujarat,  which 
amounted  to  20  million  tankas  (coins)  was  used  in  paying  the  army.  To 
prevent  desertion  of  the  troops  during  the  second  Sind  campaign,  sentinels 
were  appointed.  Deserters  were  disgraced  publicly  if  caught.41  Timur's 
invasion  of  India  during  1398-1399  with  84,000  cavalry  dealt  a  deathblow 
to  the  Delhi  Sultanate.42  Further,  it  encouraged  many  other  Central  Asian 
adventurers  such  as  Babur  to  invade  the  weakening  Delhi  Sultanate. 

38  Jackson,  "The  Mongols  and  the  Delhi  Sultanate  in  the  Reign  of  Muhammad  Tughluq". 

39  Habibullah,  The  Foundation  of  Muslim  Rule  in  India. 

40  Jauhri,  Firoz  Tughluq,  pp.  46-47. 

41  Ibid.,  pp.  81,  84-85, 118, 131. 

42  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  p.  244. 


90 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


The  armies  of  the  early  Moguls  and  their  opponents,  1494-1556 

In  1494,  Zahir-ud-din  Muhammad  Babur  inherited  the  Kingdom  of  Fer- 
ghana from  his  father  Omar  Shaikh,  son  of  Abu  Shaikh,  the  great-grandson 
of  Timur.43  Babur  relied  on  different  types  of  military  labour.  During  the 
Battle  of  Sar-i-Pul,  fought  in  1501  with  the  Uzbek  chief  Shaibani  Khan, 
Babur  deployed  household  troops.44  Virginia  Aksan  writes  that  the  Otto- 
man sultan's  court  was  organized  as  a  household  and  that  the  state  was 
regarded  as  patrimony.  The  household  comprised  the  sultan's  army  and 
his  military  headquarters.45  The  household  troops46  constituted  the  core 
group  of  Babur's  army.  They  provided  the  "braves",  the  crack  soldiers  who 
carried  out  daredevil  manoeuvres  on  the  battlefield.  They  joined  Babur's 
side  due  to  family  and  clan  connections.  And,  being  attached  to  Babur  by 
personal  relations,  unlike  the  tribal  mercenaries,  they  did  not  change  sides 
in  accordance  with  the  fluctuating  political  circumstances.  By  profession, 
they  were  warriors  and  fought  bravely  for  Babur,  like  a  band  of  brothers. 
And  they  got  the  best  rewards  after  a  successful  campaign.  In  1497,  Babur 
occupied  Samarkhand.  In  1498-1499,  Babur  commanded  some  2,000  Mongol 
soldiers  from  one  tribe.  He  said  that  these  soldiers  had  come  to  him  from 
his  mother's  side.  Babur's  mother  was  the  daughter  of  Yunus  Khan,  who 
was  a  distant  descendant  of  the  Mongol  leader  Chingiz  Khan.47  The  Mongol 
horse  archers  carried  outflank  attacks  (known  as  taulqama  charges),  which 
required  special  skills.  They  played  an  important  role  in  routing  the  Lodi 
forces  at  the  First  Battle  of  Panipat  (21  April  1526). 48 

Babur  mentions  that  the  Mongol  settlers  in  Central  Asia  were  organized 
in  various  tribes.  Many  Mongol  tribes  who  had  no  blood  relation  to  Babur 
joined  him.  Each  Mongol  tribe  at  that  time  comprised  3,000-4,000  families. 
Most  of  these  tribes  were  mobile  but  some  had  a  particular  territorial  desig- 
nation. In  1504-1505,  Rusta-Hazara,  a  Mongol  tribe  from  Badakshan,  joined 
Babur.  At  different  times,  several  tribal  leaders  with  their  retainers  joined 
Babur  in  search  of  loot  and  plunder.  Babur  had  not  defeated  these  tribal 
chieftains  and  forced  them  to  join  his  army  with  their  retainers;  instead,  the 

43  Lane-Poole,  The  Emperor  Babar,  p.  17. 

44  Babur-Nama,  I,  pp.  138-139. 

45  Aksan,  "Ottoman  War  and  Warfare",  p.  150. 

46  Abul  Fazl  uses  the  term  diwanian  to  designate  the  household  troops  who  were  considered 
the  most  loyal  and  courageous:  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  pp.  263-264. 

47  Babur-Nama,  I,  pp.  19,  21,  105,  164.  Beveridge  uses  the  term  "Mughals"  to  designate  the 
descendants  of  Chingiz  Khan  who  were  settled  in  Central  Asia. 

48  Ibid.,  II,  pp.  472-473. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


91 


soldiers  belonging  to  a  particular  tribe  fought  under  their  tribal  leader,  who 
acknowledged  the  supremacy  of  Babur.  The  tribal  chiefs  changed  sides  in 
accordance  with  the  fortunes  of  war.  They  joined  a  successful  charismatic 
warlord  who  provided  them  with  loot  and  plunder.  For  example,  in  1504, 
after  the  defeat  of  Wali  (a  brother  of  Khusrau  Shah)  by  Shaibani  Khan,  the 
former  joined  Babur  with  his  Mongol  kinsmen.49  It  was  a  case  of  an  ethnic 
(reciprocal)  mercenary  sort  of  military  employment.  However,  at  certain 
junctures,  the  Mongol  tribes  proved  unreliable.  Their  loyalty  to  Babur  was 
conditional  and  pragmatic.  In  general,  the  Mongol  tribes  were  more  willing 
to  serve  a  Chingizid  prince  rather  than  a  Timurid  mirza  (royal  prince)  such 
as  Babur.50  While  wandering  in  Central  Asia,  Babur  mentioned  that  some 
rulers  maintained  ghulams,51  though  he  himself  never  utilized  them.  The 
army  of  about  10,000-12,000  men  with  which  Babur  attacked  the  Delhi 
Sultanate  comprised  household  troops,  various  Mongol  and  Turkish  tribes, 
and  a  few  Ottoman  mercenaries.  Abul  Fazl  uses  the  terms  "Turks"  and 
"Tajiks"  to  describe  the  ethnic  composition  of  Babur's  force.52 

Babur's  opponent  at  the  First  Battle  of  Panipat,  Sultan  Ibrahim  Lodi  (r. 
1517-1526)  depended  on  the  indigenous  mercenaries.  Ibrahim  Lodi,  being  an 
Afghan,  preferred  Afghan  soldiers.  Abul  Fazl  deliberately  inflates  the  size 
of  Ibrahim's  army  to  highlight  the  courage  of  the  Mogul  soldiers  and  the 
leadership  ability  of  Babur.  Fazl  claimed  that  Ibrahim  commanded  100,000 
cavalry  and  1,000  elephants.  When  Timur  invaded  India,  the  Delhi  Sultanate 
commanded  a  bigger  region  than  the  area  controlled  by  Ibrahim.  However, 
the  Sultanate  could  only  scrape  up  10,000  cavalry  and  120  elephants  to 
oppose  Timur.53 

After  being  victorious  at  First  Panipat,  many  Afghan  chieftains  in  India 
(who  were  either  semi-autonomous  or  in  Lodi  service)  joined  Babur  as 
tributaries  with  their  retainers  (some  of  the  bands  numbering  up  to  3,000- 
4,000  men  each).54  In  many  cases,  they  were  forced  to  join  Babur  after  being 
defeated  in  battle.  Again,  many  important  chieftains  who  submitted  to 
Babur  were  rewarded  with  land  grants.  Fath  Khan  Sherwani  was  one  of 
Ibrahim  Lodi's  nobles.  When  Fath  Khan  submitted  to  Babur,  the  former  was 
given  1  crore  6  lakhs  (1  lakh  is  100,000;  1  crore  is  100  lakhs  or  10  million)  as  a 

49  Ibid.,  I,  pp.  188-189, 192, 196, 253. 

50  Dale,  The  Garden  of  the  Eight  Paradises,  pp.  187-246. 

51  Babur-Nama,  I,  p.  102. 

52  The  Akbar-Nama,\,  p.  240. 

53  Hasan,  "Aspects  of  State  and  Religion  in  Medieval  India",  p.  68;  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  pp.  241, 
243-245- 

54  Lane-Poole,  The  Emperor  Babar,  p.  172. 


92 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


reward,  and  his  son  Mahmud  Khan  was  taken  in  the  Mogul  army.55  Shaikh 
Guhran  entered  Babur's  service  with  3,000  bowmen  from  the  Ganga-Jamuna 
doab.  Firuz  Khan,  an  Afghan  noble  of  the  Lodis  who  submitted  to  Babur, 
received  a  jagir  worth  one  crore  tankas  in  Jaunpur,  and  Mahmud  Khan 
received  a  jagir  worth  90  lakhs  in  Ghazipur.5*5 

However,  not  all  the  Afghan  chiefs  submitted  to  Babur.  Many  of  them 
allied  with  Rajput  chieftain  Rana  Sangram  Singh  (also  known  as  Rana 
Sangha),  the  ruler  of  Chitor  (Udaipur)  and  confronted  the  Moguls  at  the 
Battle  of  Khanwa  (16  March  1527).  The  combined  Rajput-Afghan  force,  writes 
Abul  Fazl,  numbered  201,000  cavalry.57  Superior  firepower  and  horse  archery 
again  gave  victory  to  the  Moguls. 

After  the  death  of  Babur  (26  December  1530),  his  eldest  son  Humayun 
ascended  the  Mogul  throne.  Gujarat  and  east  India  were  the  two  trouble  spots 
for  Humayun.  In  1533,  Bahadur  Shah,  the  sultan  of  Gujarat,  depended  on  6,000 
Abyssinian  volunteers.  Some  of  Bahadur  Shah's  infantry  were  mercenaries 
from  the  Bhil  and  Koli  tribes.58  Bahadur  Shah  provided  20  crore  of  Gujarati 
coins  to  one  of  his  nobles,  Tatar  Khan,  who  with  this  money  hired  40,000 
Afghan  mercenary  cavalry.59  Some  Muslims  of  Gujarat  also  joined  his  artillery 
branch  as  mercenaries.  Bahadur  Shah  also  relied  on  some  tributary  Rajput 
chieftains  who  joined  his  standard  with  their  cavalry  retainers.60  Humayun 
moved  into  Gujarat  with  30,000  cavalry.  By  1535,  Gujaratwas  conquered.61  In 
1531,  Humayun  moved  into  east  India  and  defeated  several  Afghan  chieftains. 
They  were  ordered  to  join  the  Mogul  service  with  their  retainers.62  However, 
such  tributary  soldiers  proved  disloyal,  deserting  and  joining  Farid  (who 
became  Sher  Khan  and  then  Sher  Shah)  who  challenged  Humayun. 

Sher  Shah  was  from  the  Afghan  tribe  of  Sur.  His  grandfather  was  a  horse 
merchant  in  Agra.63  Sher  recruited  Afghans  from  Bihar,  and  many  Rajput 
chieftains  with  their  clansmen  also  joined  his  banner.  While  the  Rajputs  in 
his  army  were  mercenaries,  the  Afghans  were  mobilized  through  tribal/clan 
networks.  Sher  called  the  Afghan  qaum  (community)  to  mobilize  against 

55  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  pp.  256-257. 

56  Ibid.,  I,  p.  253. 

57  Ibid.,  I,  pp.  260-261.  Fazl  no  doubt  gives  an  exaggerated  figure  of  the  enemy  force,  as  main- 
taining such  a  large  force  was  logistically  impossible. 

58  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat,  p.  7;  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  p.  309. 

59  The  History  of  India,  Elliot  and  Dawson,  VI,  Akbar-Nama,  pp.  11-12. 

60  Ibid.,  p.  14. 

61  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  pp.  306-307. 

62  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat,  p.  3. 

63  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  pp.  326-327. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


93 


the  alien  Moguls.64  Before  fighting  Humayun,  Sher  conscripted  the  Afghans 
of  Bihar  to  join  his  army.65  This  was  a  rare  case  of  conscription  in  Indian 
history.  For  the  Afghans  in  Sher's  army,  it  was  a  case  of  ethnic  conscription. 
Some  of  Sher's  officers  were  ghulams  but  they  were  in  a  minority.  By  1540, 
Sher  commanded  150,000  cavalry  and  25,000  foot  soldiers.66 

According  to  one  estimate,  in  1540,  Humayun  mobilized  90,000  cavalry 
against  Sher  Shah.67  When  Humayun  fought  Sher  in  the  two  battles  of 
Chausa  (27  June  1539)  and  Kanauj  (17  May  1540),  the  household  troops  of 
Babur  did  not  prove  loyal  to  Humayun.  Many  household  troops  joined 
Humayun's  half-brothers,  Kamran  in  particular.  Kamran  provided  only 
3,000  of  his  20,000  cavalry  to  Humayun.68  Babur's  nobles  were  also  divided 
as  regards  their  loyalty  to  Humayun.69  After  being  defeated  by  Sher,  Hum- 
ayun reached  Persia  through  Sind,  which  was  under  the  Safavid  Dynasty. 
During  1544,  with  the  help  of  14,000  Persian  cavalry,  Humayun  was  able  to 
capture  Kandahar,  which  was  then  handed  over  to  a  Persian  garrison.  In 
1545,  Humayun  recaptured  Kandahar  from  the  Persians  in  a  surprise  attack 
with  the  aid  of  mercenary  Afghan  soldiers.  In  1551,  Humayun  captured 
Kabul  from  his  brother  Mirza  Kamran.70  In  1553,  Humayun  moved  towards 
Peshawar.  At  that  time,  several  Uzbek  chiefs  joined  his  standard.  There  is 
no  evidence  of  any  Uzbek  tribes  joining  Babur.  Some  of  the  Uzbeks  served 
Humayun's  son  Akbar.71  Sher  Shah  died  on  23  May  1545  and  was  succeeded 
by  his  son  Islam  Shah.  On  his  death  in  1553,  the  Suri  Empire  broke  up  into 
four  parts.  In  1554,  Humayun  invaded  India  and  defeated  the  Afghan  ruler 
of  Punjab  Sikander  Suri  at  Sirhind.72  The  prospect  of  plunder  attracted 
many  mercenaries  from  Central  Asia  to  Humayun's  standard.  They  were 
employed  as  temporary  volunteers.  Jouher  writes: 

About  this  time  nearly  500  Moghul  soldiers  came  from  beyond  the 
river  Oxus  to  seek  for  employment;  but  as  very  few  of  them  were 
armed,  the  general  consulted  me  what  he  should  do  with  them;  I  said, 

64  Aquil,  Sufism,  Culture,  andPolitics,  pp.  65-66, 112. 

65  Matta,  Sher  Shah  Suri,  p.  89. 

66  Aquil,  Sufism,  Culture,  andPolitics,  p.  108;  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  p.  615. 

67  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat,  p.  20. 

68  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  pp.  346,  348. 

69  Hasan,  "New  Light  on  the  Relations  of  the  Early  Mughal  Rulers  with  Their  Nobility", 
pp.  114-115. 

70  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat,  pp.  77,  80-82. 

71  Ibid.,  p.  108;  The  Akbar  Nama,  II,  pp.  48,  54. 

72  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat,  pp.  113-115;  Richards,  The  Mughal  Empire,  p.  12. 


94 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


"give  each  of  them  a  bow  and  a  quiver  of  arrows,  and  advance  them  a 
small  sum  of  money  to  support  them  for  a  month,  by  which  time  the 
business  with  the  Afghans  will  be  settled".  He  took  my  advice,  and 
having  advanced  the  money  to  the  Moghuls,  they  joined  the  army  as 
volunteers.73 

When  Humayun  recaptured  the  Mogul  throne,  Persian  Shias  began  joining 
the  Mogul  service  in  large  numbers.74 

After  Humayun's  death  on  21  January  1556,  Akbar  ascended  the  Mogul 
throne  at  Kalanaur  in  Punjab.75  A  Hindu  general  of  the  Suri  dynasty  named 
Hemu  declared  his  independence  and  captured  Delhi.  Abul  Fazl  notes  that 
Hemu's  tribe,  the  Dhusar,  was  engaged  in  making  and  selling  saltpetre  in 
Gurgaon  district.76  Hemu's  army  numbered  50,000  cavalry,  comprising  Af- 
ghans, Rajputs,  and  some  Brahman  mercenaries.  Some  of  the  Rajputs  were 
from  the  Jhansi  district  of  north  India.  Most  of  the  senior  officers  of  Hemu's 
army  were  his  relatives  from  the  Brahman  caste.  Hemu  won  over  the  Afghan 
chiefs  by  distributing  land  grants  and  treasure.77  At  Panipat,  Hemu  deployed 
30,000  cavalry.  The  Mogul  army,  10,000  strong,  under  the  nominal  leadership 
of  Akbar  but  actually  under  the  noble  Bairam  Khan  (a  Turk),  advanced  from 
Kalanaur  in  Punjab  to  confront  Hemu,  again  at  the  historical  field  of  Panipat.78 

The  emergence  of  the  mansabdari  system,  1556-1650 

After  achieving  victory  in  the  Second  Battle  of  Panipat  (5  November  1556), 
Akbar  faced  challenges  from  some  of  the  Muslim  nobles  of  Humayun  as  well 
as  from  the  Afghans  of  east  India.  Unlike  Babur,  under  Akbar  the  base  of  the 
Mogul  Empire  was  no  longer  Afghanistan,  but  north  India  proper.  So,  unlike 
Babur  and  Humayun,  Akbar  could  not  tap  the  Turkish  tribes  settled  around 
the  Oxus  River.  Moreover,  by  this  time,  the  Uzbek  Khanate,  the  sworn  enemy 
of  the  Mogul  Empire,  had  been  resurrected  in  Central  Asia.  Akbar  realized 
that  he  needed  to  broaden  the  basis  of  his  rule  by  integrating  the  Hindu 
chieftains  within  his  regime,  and  one  way  to  ensure  loyalty  among  the  various 

73  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat,  p.  118.  Here  "Moghul"  refers  to  Mongols. 

74  Khan,  "Akbar's  Personality  Traits  and  World  Outlook",  p.  82. 

75  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat,  pp.  120-121. 

76  The  Akbar- Nama,  I,  p.  617. 

77  Ibid.,  II,  pp.  47-48, 59;  Bhargava,  Hemu  and  His  Times;  see  esp.  pp.  13, 90, 100.  Richards  claims 
that  Hemu  was  of  the  Vaisya  (trader)  caste:  Mughal  Empire,  p.  13. 

78  The  Akbar-Nama,  II,  pp.  59-61. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


95 


groups  of  Muslim  nobles  and  Hindu  chieftains  was  to  establish  a  personalized 
and  semi-bureaucratic  relationship  with  them.  Such  a  relationship,  reasoned 
Akbar,  would  generate  a  more  cohesive  and  loyal  force  than  would  depend- 
ence on  the  tribal  retainers.  By  trial  and  error,  Akbar  evolved  the  mansabdari 
system.  The  mansabdars  of  Akbar  comprised  Persians,  Turanis,  Muslims  born 
in  India,  and  the  Rajput  chieftains.79  Many  Turani  and  Afghan  chieftains 
realized  that  the  institution  of  the  mansabdari  system  was  an  attempt  to  curb 
their  independence,  so  they  revolted.  However,  Akbar  was  able  to  quash  the 
rebellions  with  the  aid  of  his  loyal  mansabdars.  One  example  will  suffice. 
In  1572,  the  mirzas  in  collusion  with  the  Afghan  chieftains  revolted  against 
Akbar.  The  forces  under  the  mirzas  comprised  Abyssinians,  and  men  from 
Badakshan  and  Transoxiana.  The  rebellion  was  crushed  in  1573. 80 

Mansab  technically  meant  rank,  and  the  holder  of  the  mansab  was 
known  as  mansabdar  (an  imperial  official)  and  was  granted  a  jagir.  The 
lowest-ranking  mansabdar  commanded  10  cavalry  and  the  highest-ranking 
mansabdar  10,000.  In  Akbar's  time,  most  of  the  mansabdars  above  the 
rank  of  5,000  were  his  sons.81  Under  Akbar's  successor,  a  mansabdar  held 
two  ranks:  zat  and  sawar  ranks.  The  zat  rank  denoted  the  personal  rank  of 
the  Mogul  noble  in  the  mansabdari  system  while  the  sawar  rank  denoted 
the  number  of  cavalry  which  the  mansabdar  had  to  maintain  for  imperial 
service.82  In  a  contingent  of  a  mansabdar  of  10,000,  other  mansabdars  as  high 
as  hazaris  (commanders  of  1,000)  served.  In  the  contingent  of  a  mansabdar 
of  8,000,  mansabdars  who  were  commanders  of  800  sawar  served;  for  a 
mansabdar  of  7,000,  mansabdars  up  to  the  rank  of  700  served.83  Abdul 
Kadir  Badauni  (a  chronicler  who  lived  in  Akbar's  time)  had  written  that  the 
contingent  of  a  mansabdar  comprised  khas-khailan  (his  personal  depend- 
ants which  included  friends,  relatives,  and  clan  members,  etc.)  as  well  as 
bargirs  who  were  mercenaries.84  To  borrow  John  Lynn's  army  style  model, 
the  Mogul  army,  mainly  centred  around  the  mansabdari  system,  was  not  a 
state  commission  army85  but  an  agglomeration  of  quasi-bureaucratic  units. 

79  Zaidi,  "Akbar  and  the  Rajput  Principalities",  p.  15. 

80  The  Akbar  Nama,  III,  p.  76. 

81  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  I,  Book  Second,  p.  248. 

82  M.  Athar  Ali  claims  that  sawar  rank  represented  the  number  of  horses  and  half  the  number 
of  troopers,  a  mansabdar  had  to  maintain.  This  means  that  a  mansabdar  of  100  sawar  rank 
maintained  100  horses  and  50  troopers.  See  Ali,  "Organization  of  the  Nobility",  p.  250. 

83  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  I,  Book  Second,  pp.  241-242. 

84  The  History  of  India,  Elliot  and  Dawson,  V,  Tarikh-i-Badauni,  of  Abdul  Kadir  Badauni,  p.  515. 
A  bargir  was  a  trooper  without  a  horse.  His  employer  provided  him  with  a  horse  when  he  joined 
the  contingent. 

85  Lynn,  "The  Evolution  of  Army  Style  in  the  Modern  West". 


96 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


J.S.  Grewal  says  that  the  mansabdari  system  represented  a  suzerain/ 
vassal  relationship.86  The  mansabdari  system  was  also  partly  a  case  of  the 
tributary  form  of  military  employment.  After  being  defeated,  the  chieftains 
belonging  to  different  principalities  were  encouraged  and  at  times  coerced 
to  serve  in  the  Mogul  army  and  in  return  were  rewarded  with jagirs.  When 
Akbar  established  himself  at  Agra,  a  large  number  of  principalities  were 
under  the  control  of  autonomous  and  semi-autonomous  hereditary  chief- 
tains. The  latter  were  known  as  rajas,  ranas,  rawats,  or  rais.  They  were  also 
known  as  Rajputs,  and  the  Mogul  chroniclers  called  them  zamindars.  Some 
of  the  Rajput  chieftains  maintained  large  numbers  of  cavalry.  Those  who 
joined  the  Mogul  service  were  granted  mansabs.87  During  Shah  Jahan's 
reign,  large  numbers  of  mansabs  were  granted  to  the  Muslim  nobles  of  the 
Deccani  sultanates  in  order  to  win  them  over  to  Mogul  service.88 

Throughout  the  territories  under  their  control,  the  Moguls  collected  taxes 
from  the  peasants  through  the  zamindars  who  were  allowed  a  certain  com- 
mission for  discharging  this  duty.89  The  military  retainers  of  the  zamindars, 
claims  Douglas  E.  Streusand,  comprised  a  nucleus  of  retainers  from  their 
own  caste  supplemented  by  the  peasants.90  Many  zamindars  who  were  loyal 
to  the  Mogul  Empire  and  were  in  the  good  books  of  the  Mogul  provincial 
governors  (subadars)  were  inducted  in  the  mansabdari  service.  By  joining 
the  mansabdari  service  they  received  additional  land  grants  which  enabled 
them  to  maintain  larger  number  of  cavalry  with  which  they  could  defeat 
local  opposition  to  their  rule.  One  example  will  suffice.  In  the  thirtieth 
regnal  year  of  Shah  Jahan  (r.  1628-1658),  Salabat  Khan,  the  governor  of  the 
suba  (province)  of  Allahabad,  introduced  Anup  Singh,  the  zamindar  of 
Bandhu  in  the  durbar.  Shah  Jahan  awarded  Anup  Singh  a  mansab  of  3,000 
and  granted  him  a  jagir  for  maintaining  the  troopers  in  accordance  with 
the  number  stipulated  in  his  mansab.31 

Many  Persian  and  Turani  adventurers  who  came  to  India  in  search 
of  employment  were  also  appointed  as  mansabdars.  In  1595,  there  were 
279  mansabdars,  of  whom  47  were  Rajputs  (Hindus)  and  75  were  Persians 
(Shias).9Z  Many  Indian  Muslims  were  also  given  mansab  ranks.  For  instance, 

86  Grewal,  "The  Sikh  Movement  during  the  Reign  of  Akbar",  pp.  252-253. 

87  Khan,  "Akbar's  Initial  Encounters  with  the  Chiefs",  pp.  1,  6. 

88  Moosvi,  "The  Mughal  Empire  and  Deccan",  p.  221. 

89  Hasan,  "Zamindars  under  the  Mughals",  p.  137. 

90  Streusand,  The  Formation  of  the  Mughal  Empire,  p.  43. 

91  Shah  Jahan  Nama  of Inayat  Khan,  ed.  by  Begley  and  Desai,  pp.  529-530. 

92  Ali,  "Sulh-i  Kul  and  the  Religious  Ideas  of  Akbar",  p.  165.  Ali  does  not  consider  here  the 
mansabdars  whose  ranks  were  below  200. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


97 


one  shaikhzada  from  Lucknow  was  granted  a  mansab  of  700  by  Akbar.  In 
the  eleventh  year  of  Shah  Jahan's  reign,  the  son  of  Nazar  Muhammad,  the 
ruler  of  Balkh  came  to  India  and  joined  Mogul  service.  He  was  granted 
ranks  of  1,500  zat  and  800  sawar  and  given  a jagir  in  Bihar.93 

The  mansabdari  system  was  a  quasi-professional  and  partly  bureaucratic 
system  as  there  were  thirty-three  to  sixty-six  grades.  On  the  basis  of  their 
performance,  the  mansabdars  were  either  promoted  to  higher  ranks  or 
demoted  to  lower  ones.  Besides  possessing  a  hierarchy,  the  mansabdars 
were  also  transferred  to  different  regions  in  their  service  life  and  were  oc- 
casionally suspended  from  service.  Athar  Ali  asserts  that  the  mansabdars  in 
general  were  transferred  every  two  to  three  years.94  Generally,  mansabdars 
were  given  lifelong  employment  by  the  Mogul  durbar.  Unlike  the  mercenar- 
ies, the  mansabdars'  freedom  in  leaving  the  service  was  limited.  Khwaja 
Abdullah,  a  mansabdar  in  1611  under  Jahangir's  reign,  was  ordered  to  move 
into  Deccan.  However,  he  left  Deccan  without  imperial  permission  and,  in 
retaliation,  his  jagir  was  sequestered  by  the  imperial  government.  For  some 
time,  he  was  imprisoned  in  the  fort  of  Asir.  When  Shah  Jahan  ascended  the 
throne,  Abdullah  was  reinstated  in  service  and  given  ranks  of  5,000  zat  and 
5,000  sawar.  Again  Raja  Pratap  of  Ujjain,  a  Hindu  chieftain  of  Bihar,  who 
held  ranks  of  1,500  zat  and  1,000  sawar,  withdrew  from  service  in  the  tenth 
year  of  Shah  Jahan's  reign.  An  army  was  sent  against  him  and,  after  being 
defeated  in  battle,  he  was  executed.  In  the  twentieth  year  of  Shah  Jahan's 
reign,  Abdul  Haji  Khwaja  held  the  zat  rank  of  900  and  sawar  rank  of  600.  In 
the  next  year,  he  was  promoted  to  the  zat  rank  of  1,500  and  sawar  rank  of  800. 
In  the  twenty-third  year  of  Shah  Jahan's  reign,  his  sawar  rank  was  increased 
to  1,000.  During  the  fourth  year  of  Shahjahan's  reign,  Khwaja  was  deployed 
in  Deccan  and  then  in  Malwa.  In  the  twenty-sixth  year  of  Shahjahan's 
reign,  Khwaja  was  sent  with  Prince  Dara  Shikoh  (Shahjahan's  eldest  son)  to 
Kandahar  to  fight  the  Safavids.  At  that  time,  his  sawar  rank  remained  1,000, 
but  his  zat  rank  was  raised  from  1,500  to  2,000.  In  the  twenty-seventh  year 
of  Shahjahan's  reign,  Khwaja  was  given  the  honour  of  possessing  a  flag.95 
Again,  Akbar  introduced  the  descriptive  roll  system  and  the  issue  of  pay 
was  dependent  on  the  inspection  of  these  rolls  by  the  imperial  inspectors. 
To  prevent  borrowing  of  horses  between  the  mansabdars,  Akbar  made  the 
system  of  branding  horses  compulsory.96  The  punishment  in  the  Mogul 

93  The Maathir-ul-Umara,  I,  pp.  48-49. 

94  Ali,  "Political  Structures  of  the  Islamic  Orient",  pp.  99-100. 

95  The  Maathir-ul-Umara,  I,  pp.  36,  98-101, 103. 

96  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  I,  Book  Second,  p.  242. 


98 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


army  for  looting  civilians  was  physical  mutilation,  cutting  off  the  nose  of 
the  offender.97 

The  mansabdari  system  was  quasi-professional  because  there  was  no 
training  academy  for  the  mansabdars.  Unlike  the  European  monarchs  and 
princes,  the  Mogul  emperors  did  not  set  up  any  institution  for  teaching 
military  arts  to  the  nobles.  For  instance,  in  1606,  an  academy  was  founded 
at  Sedan  by  the  due  de  Bouillon,  brother-in-law  of  Prince  Maurice  of  Orange. 
Between  1608  and  1610,  the  Venetian  Republic  established  four  academies 
(at  Padua,  Treviso,  Udine,  and  Verona)  to  train  skilled  cavalrymen.  Similar 
institutions  were  opened  by  Landgrave  Maurice  of  Hesse-Cassel  (1618),  by 
Denmark's  Christian  IV  at  Soro  in  1623,  and  by  the  military  entrepreneur 
Count  Albrecht  von  Wallenstein  at  Gitschin  in  1624.  Don  Gaspar  de  Guzman 
Olivares  (1587-1645,  count-duke  and  chief  minister  of  Philip  IV  of  Spain) 
pushed  for  the  opening  of  the  Colegio  Imperial  (a  military  academy  for 
the  nobles)  at  Madrid  in  1625.98  The  Delhi  Sultanate  held  periodic furusiya 
exercises  for  training  mounted  archers.  In  addition,  the  cavaliers  were 
trained  in  playing  chaugan  (polo)  and  swordsmanship.99  We  are  not  sure 
whether  these  practices  continued  in  Mogul  India  or  not.  Probably,  most  of 
the  mansabdars  and  their  contingents  got  on-the-job  training  on  the  bat- 
tlefield. However,  hunting  as  military  training  continued  under  the  Moguls. 
The  mansabdari  system  was  not  hereditary.  Nevertheless,  mansabdars  who 
displayed  bravery  and  loyalty  in  imperial  service  had  their  male  heirs'  and 
relatives'  cases  assessed  favourably  by  the  durbar.  When  a  son  was  allowed 
to  succeed  his  father,  his  mansab  was  generally  lower  than  that  of  his  father. 
The  son  had  to  prove  himself  to  achieve  a  rank  similar  to  or  higher  than  his 
father's.  To  give  an  example,  Mir  Kamal-ud-Din  came  to  India  and  served 
Akbar.  Kamal-ud-Din's  son  Mirak  Husain  served  Jahangir  and  Husain's 
son  Muin-ud-Din  served  Shah  Jahan.  Under  Aurangzeb,  Muin-ud-Din 
became  the  diwan  (officer  in  charge  of  finance)  of  Lahore,  Multan,  Kabul, 
and  Kashmir.  When  Abdul  Hadi  Khwaja,  the  mansabdar  of  Shah  Jahan 
and  holding zat  rank  of  2,000  and  sawar  rank  of  1,000  died  in  1656,  his  son, 
Khawajajah,  was  given  the  zat  rank  of  1,000  and  sawar  rank  of  400.  For  the 
mansabdars,  there  was  no  clear  separation  of  civilian  and  military  posts. 
Khwaja  Abdul  Majid,  who  came  from  Central  Asia,  joined  Humayun  and 
became  a  diwan.  In  Akbar's  reign,  he  became  the  governor  of  Delhi  and  held 


97  Sarkar,  Fall  of  the  Mughal  Empire,  II,  1754-71,  p.  18. 

98  Storrs  and  Scott,  "The  Military  Revolution  and  the  European  Nobility",  p.  26. 

99  Ali,  Military  Technology  and  Warfare  in  the  Sultanate  of  Delhi,  pp.  33,  35. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


99 


a  mansab  of  3,000,'°°  and  in  his  time  most  of  the  higher-ranking  mansabdars 
were  governors  of  subas.101 

Technical  skills  and  foreign  mercenaries 

For  manufacturing  and  manning  gunpowder  weapons,  Mogul  depend- 
ence on  foreign  professionals  continued  from  Babur  to  Akbar.  During  the 
First  Battle  of  Panipat,  Ustad  Ali  Quli  Khan  was  in  charge  of  positioning 
the  matchlock  men  behind  the  chained  baggage  carts  and  the  field  guns 
deployed  in  the  centre  of  Babur's  army  at  Panipat.  In  addition,  Ustad  Quli 
Khan  was  also  in  charge  of  manufacturing  stone-throwing  mortars  of  vari- 
ous sizes  required  for  deployment  on  the  battlefield  as  well  as  for  taking  the 
forts.  He  was  present  in  the  Battle  of  Chaldiran,102  fought  in  1514  between 
the  Ottomans  and  the  Persians,  where  the  Ottomans  deployed  chained 
baggage  carts  behind  which  they  placed  their  field  guns  and  matchlock 
men.103  Another  Rumi  (Ottoman)  mercenary  of  Babur  was  Mustafa,  who 
commanded  the  culverins  in  the  Battle  of  Khanwa  and  was  in  charge  of 
arranging  the  chained  carts  in  the  Rumi  way  during  the  battle.  In  this 
battle,  Ustad  Quli  deployed  the  matchlock  men  behind  mobile  wooden 
tripods.104  The  technical  skill  of  the  Ottoman  mercenaries  in  manufacturing 
and  manning  gunpowder  weapons  made  Ustad  Quli  Khan  and  Mustafa 
valuable  for  Babur.  They  could  be  categorized  as  professional  mercenaries. 

Babur's  son  Humayun  continued  to  depend  on  them;  some  of  these 
mercenaries  were  actually  deserters  who  joined  the  Mogul  service  probably 
due  to  the  greater  prospect  of  loot  and  plunder.  Some  of  the  technical/ 
professional  mercenaries'  children  also  followed  the  profession  of  their 
fathers.  Ustad  Ali  Quli's  son,  M.K.  Rumi,  was  in  charge  of  the  Mogul  gun 
carriages  and  mortars  during  the  Battle  of  Kanauj.105  Rumi  Khan,  the 
commandant  of  the  Gujarat  Sultanate's  artillery  department,  deserted 
Sultan  Bahadur  Shah  and  joined  Humayun  in  1533.  Rumi  Khan  was  a 
military  engineer  and  was  considered  an  expert  in  siege  warfare.  In  1537, 
he  advised  Humayun  in  conducting  the  siege  of  Chunar  Fort  held  by  Sher 
Shah.  Mining,  sapping,  and  the  construction  of  batteries  were  done  under 

100  The Maathir-ul-Umara,  I,  pp.  12,  36-37. 

101  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  I,  Book  Second,  p.  252. 

102  The  Babur-Nama,  II,  pp.  466,  468-469,  473,  536,  599-600,  667. 

103  Lane-Poole,  The  Emperor  Babar,  p.  162. 

104  Babur-Nama,  II,  pp.  550,  557-558;  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  p.  263. 

105  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  p.  351. 


100 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


the  advice  of  Rumi  Khan.106  Under  Humayun,  Rumi  Khan  became  MirAtish 
(director-general  of  artillery).107  In  1555,  Ustad  Aziz  Sistani  from  Aleppo 
was  taken  into  the  Mogul  army  for  his  expertise  in  pyrotechnics.108  In  1591, 
while  campaigning  in  Sind,  the  siege  operation  against  Unarpur  Fort  was 
directed  by  Ustad  Yar  Muhammad  Khan.  He  was  considered  an  expert  in 
the  Ottoman  technique  of  raising  mounds  of  sand  on  which  the  Mogul 
batteries  were  placed  during  the  siege.  Yar  Muhammad  Khan  had  come 
from  Persia.109  Certain  Ottoman  military  techniques  had  seeped  into  Iran 
due  to  Ottoman-Safavid  military  confrontations.  So,  we  could  speculate 
that  he  was  adept  at  Ottoman  techniques  of  siege  warfare. 

Besides  the  Moguls,  the  other  Islamic  polities  in  South  Asia  also  depended 
on  foreign  mercenaries  for  harnessing  gunpowder  technology.  The  largest 
bronze  cannon  at  Bijapur,  Malik  Maidan,  was  cast  by  a  Turkish  engineer 
named  Muhammad  bin  Hasan  Rumi  in  1548.110  In  addition  to  the  Turks,  the 
subcontinent's  rulers  also  hired  West  Europeans  in  the  artillery  department. 
Bahadur  Shah  of  Gujarat  had  many  Portuguese  gunners  in  his  army.111  From 
the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth  century,  the  Mogul  artillery  was  manned 
by  Portuguese,  British,  Dutch,  German,  and  French  mercenaries.  These 
foreigners  were  deserters  from  European  ships  and  entered  Mogul  dominion 
through  Goa  for  higher  pay.  They  were  paid  Rs  200  per  month.112 

Regional  levies 

The  Moguls,  like  the  Delhi  Sultanate,  also  depended  on  the  indigenous 
regional  levies.  For  foot  musketeers,  who  were  especially  important  during 
siege  operations,  the  Mogul  Empire  hired  Hindu  mercenaries  through  the 
zamindars.  Jahangir  noted  in  his  autobiography  that  in  1609:  "I  ordered  the 
nephew  of  Bihari  Chand,  the  qanungo  [magistrate]  of  the  Agra  sarkar,  to 
muster  a  thousand  foot  soldiers  from  the  zamindars  of  Agra,  fix  a  monthly 
stipend  for  them,  and  take  them  to  Pervez  in  the  Deccan.""3  Most  of  the  foot 

106  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat,  pp.  4-5,  9-10. 

107  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  p.  331. 

108  Ibid.,  I,  p.  640. 

109  Bilgrami,  "The  Mughal  Annexation  of  Sind",  p.  48. 

110  Balasubramaniam,  "A  Catalogue  of  Massive  Forge-Welded  Iron  Cannon  in  India:  Part  1", 
P-  77- 

111  Richards,  The  Mughal  Empire,  p.  10. 

112  The  History  of  India,  Elliot  and  Dawson,  VI,  Appendix,  p.  469. 

113  The  Jahangirnama,  p.  104. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


101 


soldiers  came  from  Allahabad,  Buxar,  and  Bhojpur  in  the  Shahabad  District, 
south  of  Ganga  and  west  of  the  Son  River.  These  people  belonged  to  the  Uj- 
jayina  branch  of  Rajputs.  Another  locality  which  provided  the  foot  soldiers 
was  Baiswara  in  Awadh  which  was  inhabited  by  Baiswara  Rajputs.  The 
Unao  and  Rae  Bareilly  districts,  which  covered  about  2,000  square  miles, 
were  inhabited  by  Baiswara  Rajputs.114  Incidentally,  these  groups  joined  the 
infantry  of  Sher  Shah  and  Hemu.115  And  after  the  Moguls,  the  Rajputs  of  Bihar 
served  in  the  infantry  of  Maratha  Confederacy  and  the  East  India  Company 
during  the  eighteenth  and  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  centuries.  The 
Ain-i-Akbari  notes  some  regions  where  matchlock  men  were  available  in 
large  numbers,  Bhograi  and  Kasijora  mahals  (districts)  in  Jaleswar  Sarkar 
(division,  which  means  a  collection  of  districts)  of  Orissa.116  The  Moguls 
probably  also  tapped  these  sources.  The  musketeers  of  the  Mogul  army 
also  came  from  Bundelkhand  and  Karnatak.  The  Karnatakis  served  in  the 
army  of  the  Bijapur  Sultanate  as  well.117  In  addition  to  musketeers,  the  Mogul 
army  hired  men  equipped  with  bans  (rockets).  The  Afghans  of  Bengal  were 
considered  experts  in  this  branch  of  warfare.118 


Miscellaneous  mini-systems 

Towards  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century,  in  the  regions  outside  the  Mogul 
Empire,  various  other  forms  of  military  employment  were  operational.  In 
the  Ahmadnagar  Sultanate  in  western  Deccan,  Abyssinian  military  slaves 
and  Abyssinian  mercenaries  played  an  important  role.119  The  Abyssinians 
(also  known  as  Habshis  in  India)  were  African  Muslims  from  Ethiopia  who 
either  came  to  India  as  free-born  adventurers  or  were  imported  as  slaves. 
Most  of  the  slaves  originated  in  the  Kambata  region  of  southern  Ethiopia. 
The  Deccani  sultanates  exported  cotton  textiles  and  ivory,  and  imported 
Abyssinian  slaves  plus  Arabian  war  horses.120  According  to  one  estimate, 


114  Bhattasali,  "Bengal  Chiefs'  Struggle  for  Independence",  pp.  19, 32. 

115  TheAkbar-Nama,U,p.6o. 

116  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  II,  pp.  155-156. 

117  Sarkar,  Nadir  Shah  in  India,  p.  54. 

118  TheAkbar-Nama,l,p.3s8. 

119  Shyam,  The  Life  and  Times  of  Malik  Ambar,  p.  12;  The  Maathir-ul-Umara,  by  Beveridge,  I, 
P-54- 

120  Eaton,  A  Social  History  of  Deccan,  pp.  105-109. 


102 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


during  the  fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries,  about  10,000-12,000  slaves  were 
exported  annually  from  Ethiopia  for  the  Deccani  sultanates.121 

One  of  the  most  famous  Habshi  slaves  was  Malik  Ambar.  Malik  Ambar 
was  born  at  Harare  in  Ethiopia  in  1548-1549.  His  parents  sold  him  in  the 
slave  market  of  Baghdad  where  he  was  bought  by  the  slave  merchant  Mir 
Qasim.  Then,  he  was  sold  to  Changiz  Khan,  who  had  1,000  slaves  and  was  an 
important  noble  of  the  Ahmadnagar  Sultanate.  When  Changiz  Khan  died, 
Malik  Ambar  enrolled  himself  as  an  ordinary  soldier  in  the  Ahmadnagar 
army.  We  do  not  know  whether  Malik  Ambar  was  ever  manumitted  or  not. 
His  rise  to  power  started  when  he  was  made  a  commander  of  150  horse- 
men of  Ahmadnagar.122  This  time,  Ambar's  status  was  that  of  a  military 
entrepreneur.  Within  a  few  years,  Malik  Ambar  became  the  "sultan  maker" 
and  principal  noble  of  the  Ahmadnagar  Sultanate  until  his  death  in  1626. 
During  the  eighteenth  century,  the  Abyssinian  (also  referred  to  as  Arab) 
mercenaries  continued  in  the  service  of  the  Maratha  Confederacy. 

In  addition  to  the  Abyssinian  mercenaries  and  the  slaves,  the  Ahmadnagar 
Sultanate  also  depended  upon  the  semi-autonomous  Koli  chiefs  who  provided 
cavalry  and  infantry  and  occasionally  changed  sides  in  accordance  with 
the  shifting  political  circumstances.  The  Kolis  joined  the  Maratha  warlord 
Shivaji's  infantry  during  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth  century.  In  1625,  to 
fight  the  Portuguese,  who  fielded  mainly  infantry  equipped  with  handguns, 
Malik  Ambar  requisitioned  foot  soldiers  (known  as  hasham)  from  the  karkuns 
(district  officials)  of  Chaul  in  western  Maharashtra.  They  were  experts  in 
the  use  of  firearms,  like  the  Rajputs  of  Awadh  and  Bihar  who  joined  the 
Mogul  infantry.123  The  employment  of  musketeers  spread  in  response  to  the 
firepower-heavy  infantry  of  the  Portuguese.  As  the  Mogul  Empire  spread  into 
Deccan  during  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth  century,  the  mansabdari 
system  more  or  less  eclipsed  the  other  mini-systems  of  military  employment. 

Demography,  economy,  and  military  labourers 

At  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  population  of  England  was  4  mil- 
lion, Spain's  was  7  million,  and  France's  was  14  million.124  Between  1450 


121  Ibid.,  pp.  109-111. 

122  Shyam,  The  Life  and  Times  of  Malik  Ambar,  pp.  34-37. 

123  Ibid.,  pp.  22, 147. 

124  Nolan,  "The  Militarization  of  the  Elizabethan  State",  p.  271. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


103 


and  1700,  the  population  of  Europe  rose  from  50  million  to  120  million.125 
During  the  eighteenth  century,  while  Iran's  population  was  9  million,  the 
population  of  the  Ottoman  Empire  was  30  million.126  In  1601,  the  population 
of  the  subcontinent  (3.2  million  km2)  was  145  million.127  In  the  seventeenth 
century,  the  rate  of  increase  of  population  was  roughly  0.21  per  cent  per 
annum.128  The  vast  demographic  resources  of  South  Asia  resulted  in  the 
absence  of  conscription  in  the  subcontinent. 

The  very  existence  of  an  extensive  potential  military  labour  pool  did 
not  encourage  the  Mogul  emperors  to  maintain  a  select  standing  army 
comprising  drilled  and  disciplined  infantry  and  cavalry  troopers.  Since 
supply  exceeded  demand,  there  was  no  point  in  maintaining  a  big  standing 
army  year  after  year.  Rather,  during  emergencies,  infantry  and  cavalry  were 
raised  at  short  notice  and  sent  to  the  trouble  spots.  And  after  the  crisis  was 
over,  the  soldiers  hired  from  the  zamindars  for  a  particular  campaign  were 
disbanded.  Abul  Fazl  tells  us  that  in  Akbar's  empire  (which  excluded  Deccan 
and  south  India),  the  zamindars  were  able  to  furnish  4  million  and  4  lakh 
armed  men.129  The  Ain-i-Akbari  further  informs  us  that  the  forces  under  the 
zamindars  of  Bengal  Suba  comprised  23,330  cavalry  and  801,150  infantry.130 

Politics  and  the  culture  of  military  remuneration,  and  not  the  economy 
of  South  Asia,  payment  of  the  military  entrepreneurs  and  their  retainers 
through  land  grants  rather  than  cash.  Instead  of  economic  forces,  the  nature 
of  politics  determined  the  form  of  remuneration  to  the  military  labourers. 
The  centralized  Turkish  state  built  by  Sultan  Alauddin  Khalji  (r.  1296-1316), 
who  had  a  standing  cavalry  force  paid  in  tonkas,  had  disintegrated  by  the 
time  of  the  establishment  of  the  Lodi  dynasty  under  Bahlul  (r.  1451-1489). 
John  F.  Richards  writes  that  there  was  no  shortage  of  precious  metal  in 
north  India,  and  trade  and  commerce  were  flourishing  in  the  first  half  of 
the  sixteenth  century  there.  However,  due  to  the  decentralized  tribal  nature 
of  Lodi  polity,  Bahlul  was  forced  to  assign  land  grants  permanently  to  the 
various  Afghan  tribal  chiefs  (Lodi,  Lohani,  Farmuli,  and  Sharwani  clans,  all 
of  which  belonged  to  the  Ghilzai  tribe)  who  maintained  troopers  from  the 
revenues  extracted  from  the  grants.  Bahlul  had  no  control  over  the  revenues 
of  these  grants.  These  tribal  chiefs  were  semi-autonomous.  Bahlul  had  to 
depend  on  clan  ties  and  blood  relationships  with  the  Afghan  chiefs  while 

125  Ali,  "The  Passing  of  the  Empire",  p.  339. 

126  Axworthy,  The  Sword  of  Persia,  p.  29. 

127  Richards,  The  Mughal  Empire,  p.  1. 

128  Moosvi,  "The  Indian  Economic  Experience  1600-1900",  pp.  4-5. 

129  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  I,  Book  Second,  p.  241. 

130  Ibid.,  II,  p.  141. 


104 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


mobilizing  their  forces.  In  fact,  Bahlul  lacked  a  standing  army  under  his 
direct  control.  Bahlul's  successor,  Sikander  Lodi  (r.  1489-1517),  amassed  loot 
by  plundering  the  Rajput  principalities.131  Ibrahim  Lodi,  son  of  Sikander, 
raised  the  mercenaries  just  before  the  battle  from  the  bazaars  (markets)  of 
Delhi  by  distributing  cash  from  the  wealth  stored  by  his  predecessors.132  In 
Ibrahim's  reign,  the  monthly  wage  of  a  footman  was  5  Sikandari  tankas  and 
that  of  a  sawar  varied  between  20  and  30  Sikandari  tankas.133 

Even  the  Rajput  principalities  maintained  troops  by  grantingyag/rs  to 
their  chiefs.  Abul  Fazl  writes  that  among  the  Rajputs  the  custom  was  that  a 
jagirdar  holding  a jagirworth  100,000  maintained  100  horses,  and  a jagirdar 
holding  a jagirworth  one  crore  was  able  to  maintain  10,000  horses.134 

Sher  Shah  acquired  900,000  silver  tankas  after  defeating  Sultan  Ghiyas- 
uddin  Mahmud  of  Bengal  in  1535.135  Between  1535  and  1537,  Sher's  army 
increased  from  6,000  to  70,000  horsemen  and  the  latter's  salary  bill  came 
to  about  12  crore  tankas  per  month.  Raziuddin  Aquil  asserts  that  Sher  paid 
his  soldiers  a  fixed  sum  every  month  in  cash  and  that  they  were  not  allowed 
to  engage  in  pillage  and  plundering  while  campaigning.136  Sher  Shah  issued 
coins  from  his  mints  at  Shergarh  in  Rohtas  and  Hajipur  near  Patna.137  In  1537, 
Sher,  controlling  Bihar  and  Bengal,  had  an  annual  income  of  16  crore  tankas.138 

In  October  1504,  Babur  occupied  Kabul  and  Ghazni.  Then,  he  distributed 
tuyuls  (fiefs)  to  some  of  his  begs  (nobles  with  armed  retainers)  who  had 
served  him  from  the  earliest  times.139  They  were  probably  the  chiefs  of  his 
loyal  household  troops.  Babur  could  afford  to  do  this  because  by  that  time 
he  was  a  territorial  prince  with  a  kingdom  comprising  Afghanistan.  This  was 
the  first  instance  of  regular  payment  in  kind  that  Babur  made  to  his  military 
officers.  After  conquering  Punjab,  Babur  bestowed  various  regions  on  his  dif- 
ferent commanders.  For  example,  Dipalpur  was  given  to  Baqi  Shaghawal.140 
In  addition,  Babur  also  depended  on  pillage  and  plunder  to  sustain  and 
reward  his  troops  after  victories.  To  give  an  example,  in  1519,  Babur  levied 

131  Richards,  "The  Economic  History  of  the  Lodi  Period". 

132  Babur-Nama,  II,  p.  470. 

133  Roy,  Niamatullah's  History  of  the  Afghans,  pp.  187-188;  20  Sikandari  tankas  are  equal  to  1 
silver  tanka. 

134  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  p.  260.  Abul  Fazl  does  not  specify  whether  the  annual  revenue  was 
calculated  in  tankas  or  dams. 

135  Hussain,  "Glimpses  of  Silver  Coins  of  the  Patna  Mint",  p.  185. 

136  Aquil,  Sufism,  Culture,  and  Politics,  pp.  76, 105-106, 108. 

137  Hussain,  "Glimpses  of  Silver  Coins  of  the  Patna  Mint",  pp.  184-185. 

138  Aquil,  Sufism,  Culture,  and  Politics,  pp.  107-108. 

139  Babur-Nama,  I,  pp.  199,  227. 

140  Ibid.,  II,  p.  463. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


105 


400,000  shahrukhis  (20,000  pounds  sterling)  as  protection  money  from  Bhira 
on  the  left  bank  of  Jhelum.  After  victory  in  the  First  Battle  of  Panipat,  the 
Moguls  captured  Delhi  and  Agra  and  acquired  a  large  amount  of  coined  and 
non-coin  treasure  that  had  been  accumulated  by  the  Delhi  Sultanate.  Babur 
divided  a  portion  of  the  spoils  (jewels,  gold  and  silver  money)  among  his 
troops.  The  amirs  got  between  5  to  10  lakh  tankas  each  and  the  soldiers  got 
cash.141  Babur's  son  Humayun  also  followed  the  policy  of  parcelling  out  his 
realm  among  his  nobles  so  that  the  latter  could  maintain  their  contingents 
from  the  revenues  of  the  tracts  assigned  to  them.142  After  a  victory,  Humayun 
would  distribute  the  loot  among  his  nobles  and  their  retainers.  For  instance 
in  1533  after  capturing  Champanir,  the  capital  of  Gujarat,  the  treasure  found 
in  the  fort  was  distributed  among  his  army  personnel.143 

The  principal  income  of  the  Mogul  Empire  came  from  land  tax,  and 
agriculture  was  expanding  in  the  Mogul  Empire.  For  example,  by  c.  1600, 
the  extensive  forest  in  the  western  part  of  the  Ganga-Jamuna  doab  was 
cleared  and  the  region  was  intensely  cultivated  and  densely  populated.144 
The  peasants  sold  the  grain  to  pay  revenue  in  cash.  Abul  Fazl  writes  that  the 
peasants  in  Bengal  paid  their  taxes  in  mohurs  (golden  coins)  and  rupees.145 
Sonargaon  in  Bengal  produced  world-famous  muslin.146  India  exported 
cotton  textiles,  indigo,  and  pepper  to  South-East  Asia,  East  Africa,  and  the 
Middle  East.147  Economically,  Mogul  India  was  in  a  favourable  position 
vis-a-vis  Persia.  Silk  from  Bengal  pushed  silk  manufactured  in  Persia  out  of 
the  European  markets,  and  Indian  cotton  was  also  imported  into  Persia.  The 
balance  of  trade  was  therefore  more  favourable  to  India  than  to  Persia.148 
Prasannan  Parthasarathi  claims  that  Indian  calicoes  and  muslins  captured 
the  European  markets.  Due  to  a  loss  of  bullion,  the  Europeans  raised  tariff 
barriers  against  the  entry  of  Indian  textiles.149  Parthasarathi  and  Richards 
write  that  the  Mogul  Empire  was  self-financing  from  its  own  resources. 
The  emperors  did  not  have  to  depend  on  loans  from  the  private  financiers. 
State  finance  depended  on  a  robust  monetary  system,  which  in  turn  relied 

141  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  pp.  238,  248. 

142  Matta,  Sher  Shah  Suri,  pp.  92-93. 

143  The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat,  p.  6. 

144  Moosvi,  "Ecology,  Population  Distribution,  and  Settlement  Pattern  in  Mughal  India", 
pp.  92, 100. 

145  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  II,  p.  134. 

146  Ibid.,  II,  p.  136. 

147  Moosvi,  "Urban  Population  in  Pre-Colonial  India",  p.  126;  Richards,  The  Mughal  Empire,  p.  4. 

148  Axworthy,  The  Sword  of  Persia,  p.  28. 

149  Parthasarati,  "Was  There  Capitalism  in  Early  Modern  India?"  p.  353. 


106 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


upon  the  regular  inflow  of  gold,  silver,  and  copper.  India  produced  inad- 
equate quantities  of  these  precious  metals,  but  its  export  surplus  enabled 
the  country  to  import  large  amounts  that  had  been  produced  in  the  New 
World  and  Japan.  Akbar  established  a  tripartite  currency  system  based 
on  gold,  silver,  and  copper  coins  issued  from  the  centrally  administered 
imperial  mints.150  The  important  mints  of  Mogul  Empire  were  at  Cambay, 
Lahore,  Multan,  Kabul,  Patna,  Rajmahal,  and  so  forth.151  In  Akbar's  reign, 
the  mints  at  Ajmir,  Delhi,  Fatehpur  Sikri,  and  Lahore  produced  silver  coins. 
The  two  great  cities  of  Agra  and  Fatehpur  Sikri  were  bigger  than  London  and 
Amsterdam.152  The  coins  were  used  to  pay  the  merchants  who  imported  war 
horses  from  Central  Asia  and  Persia.153  Shireen  Moosvi  speculates  that  from 
1576  onwards  the  silver  currency  output  of  the  Mogul  Empire  was  151.69 
metric  tonnes  annually.154  Towards  the  end  of  Akbar's  period,  the  Mogul 
Empire  retained  an  annual  surplus  of  income  over  expenditure  of  between 
3.9  million  and  4.7  million  silver  rupees  equivalent  in  cash.155  Streusand  is 
wrong  in  saying  that  incomplete  monetization  of  the  economy,  rudimentary 
banking  institutions,  and  the  difficulty  of  transporting  large  amount  of 
cash  made  the  central  collection  of  revenue  and  distribution  of  cash  salaries 
impractical,  and  that  therefore  the  Moguls  used  the  jagir  system.156 

Despite  the  presence  of  a  monetized  economy  in  the  subcontinent,  the 
culture  of  remuneration  was  to  pay  the  soldiers  (especially  the  higher  ranks, 
i.e.,  officers)  by  issuing  land  grants,  and  the  ultimate  objective  of  these 
officers  was  to  establish  themselves  as  landed  aristocracy  with  territorial 
bases.157  Only  the  mercenaries  were  paid  in  cash.  The  pay  of  the  matchlock 
men  varied  between  2.5  to  6.25  rupees  (henceforth  Rs)  per  month.  The  pay 
of  a  mirdaha  (non-commissioned  officer  of  the  matchlock  men)  varied 
between  6.5  and  7.5  Rs  per  month.158  During  the  first  half  of  the  sixteenth 
century,  the  level  of  monetization  was  low  in  Deccan.  However,  in  the 
seventeenth  century,  west  India  experienced  a  high  level  of  monetization 

150  Richards,  "The  Seventeenth  Century  Crisis  in  South  Asia",  pp.  628-629. 

151  Moosvi,  "The  Silver  Influx,  Money  Supply,  Prices  and  Revenue-Extraction  in  Mughal  India", 
pp.  42-43- 

152  Moosvi,  "Urban  Population  in  Pre-Colonial  India",  pp.  130-131. 

153  Haidar,  "Disappearance  of  Coin  Minting  in  the  1580s?"  pp.  57-58,  60. 

154  Moosvi,  "The  Silver  Influx,  Money  Supply,  Prices  and  Revenue-Extraction  in  Mughal  India", 
P-  45- 

155  Richards,  "The  Seventeenth  Century  Crisis  in  South  Asia",  p.  627. 

156  Streusand,  The  Formation  of  the  Mughal  Empire,  pp.  67-68. 

157  Gordon,  "Symbolic  and  Structural  Constraints  on  the  Adoption  of  European-Style  Military 
Technologies",  p.  159. 

158  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  I,  Book  Second,  Note  by  the  translator,  p.  258. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


107 


due  to  the  export  of  cotton  textiles  from  Surat.  Still,  the  Maratha  chieftains 
wanted  to  be  paid  through  land  grants  (saranjams,  non-hereditary  land 
grants  for  military  service,  and  imams,  hereditary  land  grants  for  special 
service  and  merit).159 

The  mansabdars  were  not  paid  in  cash.  For  example,  Abdullah  Khan,  one 
of  the  principal  officers  of  Humayun,  was  granted  the  rank  of  5,000  by  Akbar 
during  the  seventh  year  of  his  reign  and  was  granted  Kalpi  as  a  jagir.160  For 
conducting  campaigns  on  behalf  of  the  Moguls,  the  emperors  gave  jagirs  to 
those  Hindu  chieftains  who  held  mansabs.  In  an  attempt  to  control  these 
chieftains  and  also  to  prevent  the  expansion  of  their  territorial  bases,  the 
imperial  court  granted jagirs  in  regions  far  away  from  their  principalities.161 
In  case  of  disloyalty,  these  jagirs  were  sequestered  by  the  imperial  court. 
The  jama-dami  (estimated  income  from  the  jagir)  was  equivalent  to  the 
talab  (salary)  of  the  mansabdar.162  Moosvi  asserts  that  the  price  rise  in  the 
seventeenth  century  was  about  30  per  cent.  Between  1595  and  1700,  the  jama 
(assessed  revenue)  of  the  Mogul  Empire  (excluding  Deccan)  registered  an 
increase  of  about  44  per  cent.163  By  the  mid-seventeenth  century,  due  to 
the  onset  of  the  agrarian  crisis,  the  mansabdars  holding  ranks  of  4,000  and 
5,000  were  able  to  extract  only  three  to  four  months'  pay  in  a  year  from  their 
jagirs.16*  This  was  the  case  during  the  first  half  of  the  sixteenth  century  for 
those  mansabdars  whose  jagirs  were  assigned  in  Deccan.165  This  was  due 
to  the  gap  between  jama  and  hal-i-hasil  (the  amount  which  actually  could 
be  realized  from  the  jagir).  Continuous  warfare  in  Deccan  and  the  failure 
of  the  monsoon  resulted  in  famine;  these  three  causes  led  to  the  collapse 
of  agriculture,  which  in  turn  triggered  the  agrarian  crisis.166  The  crisis  in 
the  mansabdari  system  was  related  to  the  agrarian  crisis,167  an  issue  which 
is  not  relevant  for  my  limited  purpose  in  this  chapter. 

Most  of  the  land  in  the  Mogul  Empire  was  granted  as  jagirs  to  the 
mansabdars.  Only  a  small  portion,  known  as  khalisa  (crown  land),  was 
administered  directly  by  the  emperor's  bureaucrats.  The  revenue  from  the 

159  Gordon,  The  Marathas:  1600-1818,  pp.  21-22. 

160  The  Maathir-ul-Umara,  by  Beveridge,  I,  p.  82. 

161  Zaidi,  "Akbar  and  the  Rajput  Principalities",  p.  16. 

162  Ali,  "Towards  an  Interpretation  of  the  Mughal  Empire",  p.  62. 

163  Moosvi,  "An  Estimate  of  Revenues  of  the  Deccan  Kingdoms",  p.  293. 

164  The  Maathir-ul-Umara,  by  Beveridge,  I,  p.  104. 

165  Moosvi,  "The  Mughal  Empire  and  the  Deccan",  pp.  219-220. 

166  Moosvi,  "Scarcities,  Prices,  and  Exploitation",  pp.  230-231. 

167  The  literature  on  the  agrarian  crisis  and  its  adverse  effect  on  the  loyalty  of  the  mansabdars 
and  the  efficiency  of  their  contingents  is  vast.  S.  Nurul  Hasan  states  that  the  crisis  began  in  the 
first  decade  of  the  seventeenth  century:  Hasan,  "The  Theory  of  Nurjahan  'Junta'",  p.  128. 


108 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


khalisa  was  utilized  for  meeting  the  emperor's  personal  expenses  and  those 
of  his  own  small  standing  army,  known  as  the  ahadis.168  Around  1600,  the 
Mogul  nobility  (mansabdars)  absorbed  about  82  per  cent  of  the  Mogul  Em- 
pire's total  revenue.169  Abul  Fazl  tells  us  that  the  annual  revenue  of  the  Mogul 
Empire  in  1594  amounted  to  62  crores  97  lakhs  55,246  dams  (Rs  90,743, 881).170 
In  1648,  according  to  one  estimate,  the  net  revenue  income  of  the  Mogul 
Empire  was  880  crore  dams.171  Under  Akbar,  there  were  1,600  mansabdars 
(1,350  mansabdars  with  ranks  of  150  and  below  and  250  mansabdars  with 
ranks  higher  than  150).  In  Shahjahan's  time,  there  were  8,000  mansabdars.172 
In  contrast  to  the  large  number  of  retainers  of  the  mansabdars,  Akbar 
maintained  only  12,000  cavalry  and  12,000  matchlock  men  under  his  direct 
control.  These  24,000  soldiers  were  known  as  ahadis.  Under  Shah  Jahan, 
there  were  only  7,000  ahadis.173  As  a  point  of  comparison,  in  1550,  Ivan  IV 
of  Russia  maintained  a  standing  force  of  3,000  select  musketeers,  each 
of  whom  was  paid  4  rubles  a  year.174  In  1648,  the  force  recruited  and  paid 
directly  by  the  Mogul  imperial  establishment  amounted  to  only  47,000 
soldiers.175 

Most  of  the  Mogul  army  personnel  were  under  the  mansabdars.  The  theo- 
retical potential  strength  of  the  forces  under  the  Moguls  in  1647  numbered 
911,400  cavalry  and  infantry.  The  revenues  of  the  Mogul  Empire  amounted 
to  12,071,876,840  dams  (320  dams  was  equivalent  to  £1  sterling).176  Streusand 
interprets  Abul  Fazl's  figure  by  saying  that  the  Mogul  Empire  supported 
342,696  cavalry  and  4,039,097  infantry.  The  total  number  of  cavalry  and 
infantry  comprised  roughly  10  per  cent  of  the  male  population.177  Accord- 
ing to  another  author,  Shah  Jahan  maintained  200,000  cavalry  and  40,000 
infantry  (musketeers,  artillerymen,  rocket  men,  etc.).  This  was  exclusive 
of  the  soldiers  maintained  by  the  faujdars  (Mogul  officials  in  charge  of 
maintaining  law  and  order  in  a  district)  and  district  officials  concerned 
with  the  administration  of  revenue.  The  breakdown  of  the  200,000  cavalry 
was  as  follows:  185,000  troopers  of  the  mansabdars,  8,000  mansabdars,  and 

168  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  I,  Book  Second,  pp.  252,  259-260. 

169  Trivedi,  "The  Share  of  the  Mansabdars  in  State  Revenue  Resources",  p.  411. 

170  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  II,  p.  129. 

171  Moosvi,  "Expenditure  on  Buildings  on  under  Shah  Jahan",  p.  199. 

172  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  I,  Book  Second,  Note  by  the  translator,  pp.  257-258. 

173  Ibid.,  I,  Book  Second,  Note  by  the  translator,  p.  256;  Akbar-Nama,  I,  p.  642. 

174  Davies,  "The  Foundations  of  Muscovite  Military  Power",  p.  22. 

175  Moosvi,  "Expenditure  on  Buildings  on  under  Shah  Jahan",  p.  200. 

176  Fraser,  The  History  of  Nadir  Shah,  pp.  27, 33. 

177  Streusand,  The  Formation  of  the  Mughal  Empire,  p.  41. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


109 


7,000  mounted  ahadis.178  A  Mogul  field  army  at  that  time  numbered  about 
50,000  cavalry  and  10,000  infantry.179 

Culture  and  combat  motivation 

Greed,  asserts  Sukraniti,  motivated  the  mercenaries  to  join  battle.180  The 
Nitiprakasika  highlights  the  importance  of  regular  pay  in  motivating  the 
soldiers.181  Nevertheless,  men  do  not  fight  for  pecuniary  rewards  alone. 
Mentality  is  an  important  constituent  of  pre-combat  and  in-combat  ethos. 
And  at  times  military  service  defined  the  identity  of  various  communities. 
Despite  the  rise  and  fall  of  polities  due  to  fluctuations  in  politics  and  the 
changing  nature  of  technologies,  the  culture  of  the  various  communities 
changes  very  slowly.  So  the  Hindu  texts  generated  during  pre-Mogul  era 
offer  a  window  into  the  mentality  of  the  Hindu  warrior  ethos. 

The  cultural  ethos  of  the  Rajputs  (the  landowning  aristocracy  also  known 
as  thakurs),  who  resisted  the  Turks  and  became  an  important  segment  of  the 
Mogul  army  from  Akbar  onwards,  needs  to  be  evaluated.  The  term  "Rajput" 
is  derived  from  the  word  rajaputra  meaning  sons  of  the  king.  Military 
service,  especially  mounted  service,  was  very  popular  among  the  Rajputs.182 
The  Rajputs'  military  ethic  was  guided  by  kshatradharma,  which  had  some 
parallel  with  chivalry  of  the  medieval  west  European  knights.183  Loyalty  and 
bravery  were  the  two  core  values  of  kshatradharma.  The  ideology  of  combat 
centred  on  duty  to  one's  master  and  the  display  of  individual  prowess  in 
the  battlefield.184  The  Rajput  concept  of  namak  halali  (loyalty  to  the  salt- 
giver)  means  that  they  should  remain  loyal  to  the  person  whose  salt  they 


178  The  Ain-i-Akbari,  I,  Book  Second,  Note  by  the  translator,  p.  254. 

179  This  was  the  size  of  the  army  sent  against  Safavid  Kandahar  in  1650:  The  History  of  India, 
Elliott  and  Dawson,  VII,  Shah  Jahan  Nama  of  Inayat  Khan,  p.  99. 

180  Oppert,  On  the  Weapons,  Army  Organization,  and  Political  Maxims  of  the  Ancient  Hindus, 
p.  139.  Sukraniti  and  Nitiprakasika  are  political  texts  generated  by  the  Hindus  during  the  early 
medieval  period.  These  normative  texts  deal  with  the  duties  of  a  just  ruler,  the  concept  of 
dharmayuddha  (just  war),  the  ethics  of  conducting  warfare,  the  use  of  new  weapons,  and 
political  guidance  for  just  rulers. 

181  Nitiprakasika,  p.  26. 

182  Sharma,  "The  Military  System  of  the  Mewar  (Udaipur)  State",  p.  118;  Ziegler,  "Evolution  of 
the  Rathor  State  of  Marvar",  p.  194. 

183  Yadava,  "Chivalry  and  Warfare". 

184  Ziegler,  "Evolution  of  the  Rathor  State  of  Marvar",  p.  202. 


110 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


have  eaten,  in  other  words,  to  their  employer.185  The  Rajput  heroic  ballads 
emphasized  that  seva  (duty  and  loyalty)  to  the  lord  was  more  important  than 
duty  and  loyalty  towards  one's  family.186  The  bravery  of  the  Rajputs  revolved 
around  the  concept  of paurusha  (manliness),  which  means  sacrificing  one's 
life  in  the  battlefield.  The  Prithvirajvijayamahakavya  tells  us  that  for  the 
Chauhans  (a  Rajput  clan)  fighting  was  a  way  of  life.  The  Rajputs  considered 
themselves  as  Kshatriyas,  and  soldiering  was  regarded  as  their  caste  duty. 
They  believed  that  tactical  retreat  in  the  battlefield  was  inglorious,  and 
they  considered  that  sacrificing  their  lives  on  the  battlefield,  rather  than 
becoming  prisoners-of-war,  was  the  highest  possible  achievement.187  The 
medieval  Hindu  text  Sukraniti  emphasizes  that  it  is  a  sin  for  a  Kshatriya  to 
die  peacefully  at  home.  Rather,  the  Kshatriya  earns  a  noble  death  by  dying 
in  the  battlefield  while  slaying  enemies.  Those  Kshatriyas  who  die  in  the 
battlefield  achieve  viragati  (they  become  heroes  and  ascend  to  heaven).  Such 
a  reward  is  acquired  by  the  rishis  (sages)  only  after  long  ascetic  practices.188 
The  Arthasastra  also  notes  that  soldiering  is  the  caste  duty  of  the  Kshatri- 
yas.189 When  the  Islamic  threat  was  absent,  the  various  Rajput  clans  fought 
among  themselves  for  glory.190  The  contingents  of  the  Rajput  mansabdars 
maintained  charans  (bards)  whose  duty  was  to  encourage  the  soldiers  by 
playing  martial  music  and  reciting  Rajput  heroic  ballads.191 

The  Mogul  military  system  also  utilized  caste  and  clan  feelings  to  build 
up  primary  group  solidarity  and  camaraderie.  The  mansabdars'  contingents 
were  not  mono-ethnic  units.  The  contingents  of  Rajput  mansabdars  did 
not  comprise  solely  Rajput  troopers  but  also  included  Muslim  sowars.192 
Generally,  the  Rajput  mansabdars  had  one-sixth  of  their  contingents  from 
the  non-Rajput  groups.  However,  Rajput  troopers  preferred  to  serve  under 
Rajput  chiefs.  Several  generations  served  simultaneously  in  a  contingent 
of  a  mansabdar.  For  instance,  fathers,  sons,  uncles,  nephews,  cousins, 
and  brothers  all  served  simultaneously  in  the  contingent  of  a  particular 
mansabdar.™  The  clan  members  were  led  on  the  battlefield  by  the  clan 

185  Stewart  Gordon  erroneously  translates  namakhalali  as  lun.  See  Gordon,  "Zones  of  Military 
Entrepreneurship  in  India",  pp.  186-187. 

186  Trivedi,  "Images  of  Women  from  the  Fourteenth  to  the  Sixteenth  Century",  p.  209. 

187  Prithvirajvijayamahakavya,  DitiyaAdhyaya,  Sastha  Adhaya. 

188  Oppert,  On  the  Weapons,  Army  Organization,  and  Political  Maxims  of  the  Ancient  Hindus, 
pp.  125-126. 

189  The  Kautily a  Arthasastra,  Part  II,  p.  7. 

190  Prithvirajvijayamahakavya,  Chaturtha  Adhyaya. 

191  Zaidi,  "Ordinary  Kachawaha  Troopers  serving  the  Mughal  Empire",  p.  63. 

192  Ibid.,  pp.  62-63. 

193  Zaidi,  "Rozindar  Troopers  under  Sawai  Jai  Singh  of  Jaipur",  pp.  47-48. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


111 


leaders.194  The  different  Rajput  clans  who  joined  the  Mogul  service  were  the 
Rathors,  Sisodias,  Kachawahas,  Haras,  Bhatis,  and  others.195 

Stewart  Gordon  asserts  that  the  process  of  the  rise  of  the  Marathas  in 
medieval  west  India  was  somewhat  similar  to  the  emergence  of  Rajputs  in 
north  India.  Through  service  in  the  army  and  subsequently  acquiring  rights 
over  the  land,  and  then  consolidating  such  rights  and  following  certain 
rituals  and  customs,  many  became  hereditary  warrior  elites.196  Basically,  the 
warrior  ethos  of  the  Rajputs  and  the  Marathas  emphasized  winning  glory 
and  money  and  acquiring  power.  Social  mobility  was  achieved  by  fighting 
on  horseback.  They  had  a  disdain  for  those  who  practised  agriculture.197 
Those  families  in  west  India  who  followed  the  profession  of  soldiering  and 
acquired  land  were  known  as  Marathas,  in  contrast  to  the  lowly  kunbis 
(ordinary  cultivators  and  artisans).  The  Marathas  served  as  mercenaries  in 
the  Muslim  sultanates  of  pre-Mogul  India.  Gradually,  the  Maratha  families 
established  themselves  in  particular  regions  and  became  semi-autonomous. 
Thus,  they  could  not  be  categorized  as  service  elites.198 

The  ethos  of  mercenary  soldiering  existed  in  pre-Mogul  India.  The  Hindu 
mercenaries  are  known  as  bhrata  balas  (literally  "hired  soldiers")  in  Sanskrit 
literature.  Several  of  them  belonged  to  families  whose  hereditary  trade 
was  soldiering.199  The  Panchantantra  says  that  the  mercenaries  should 
pursue  the  profession  of  soldiering  without  thinking  about  the  reasons 
behind  warfare.200  In  the  villages,  akharas  (gymnasiums)  existed  in  which 
the  mercenaries  engaged  in  wrestling  to  keep  themselves  physically  fit.201 

Many  of  them  were  worshippers  of  the  Hindu  war  gods  Kartik  and 
Vishnu.202  William  Pinch  writes  that  the  armed  ascetics,  especially  those 
who  were  worshippers  of  Lord  Shiva  (the  Hindu  god  of  destruction),  known 
as  Saivaites,  played  an  important  role  in  the  military  labour  market  of 
Hindustan.  Pinch  continues  that  the  tradition  of  armed  ascetics  functioning 
as  mercenaries  went  back  to  ancient  times.  Saiva  asceticism  did  not  preach 
world  denial.  Theyogis  (those  who  engage  in  yoga,  i.e.,  in  ascetic  practices 

194  Sharma,  "The  Military  System  of  the  Mewar  (Udaipur)  State",  p.  121. 

195  Ali,  "Causes  of  the  Rathor  Rebellion  of  1679",  p.  259. 

196  Gordon,  The  Marathas:  1600-1818,  p.  16. 

197  Gordon,  "Zones  of  Military  Entrepreneurship  in  India",  p.  184. 

198  Gordon,  The  Marathas:  1600-1818,  pp.  15, 17. 

199  Arthasastra,  Part  II,  Kangle,  p.  316. 

200  Quoted  in  Oppert,  On  the  Weapons,  Army  Organization,  and  Political  Maxims  of  the  Ancient 
Hindus,  p.  32. 

201  Ibid.,  p.  85. 

202  Kathasaritsagara,  I,  pp.  42, 156. 


112 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


to  gain  spiritual  power)  did  not  aim  to  become  saints  in  the  conventional 
sense  of  the  term.  They  were  not  noted  for  an  intense  love  of  God.  Rather, 
they  aspired  to  become  a  second  Shiva  on  earth.  One  of  the  bonds  that  held 
the  armed  ascetic  warrior  bands  together  was  the  concept  of  chela,  a  faithful 
disciple.  Most  of  the  chelas  were  originally  slave  boys  who  were  sold  by  their 
poor  parents  to  the  yogis  in  the  asrams  (Hindu  religious  institutions).203  The 
armed  Hindu  devotees  of  the  god  Vishnu  were  known  as  bairagis.  They 
were  led  by  mahants  (heads  of  the  religious  order).  The  armed  ascetics 
consumed  bhang,  opium,  and  other  intoxicants  before  joining  battle  in 
order  to  increase  their  enthusiasm  for  fighting.204 

Finally,  let  us  turn  our  focus  to  the  motivation  of  the  Muslim  soldiery.  If 
we  believe  Simon  Digby,  then  the  Turani  soldiers  of  the  Mogul  army  were 
devotees  of  the  Sufi  saints.205  The  idea  of  Sufis  being  peace-loving  saints 
engaged  in  building  bridges  between  the  two  antagonistic  communities, 
Hindus  and  Muslims,  is  now  rightly  discredited.206  Digby  asserts  that  even 
the  Afghan  soldiers  of  Sher  Shah  believed  that  the  Sufi  pirs  could  make  the 
difference  between  victory  and  defeat  on  the  battlefield.207  Many  of  the 
Mogul  troopers  had  Naqshbandi  affiliations.  The  Sufi  saints  traveled  to  and 
fro  between  Transoxiana  and  Deccan.  While  some  shaikhs  functioned  as 
traveling  pirs  catering  to  the  spiritual  needs  of  the  soldiers,  other  shaikhs 
established  khanqas  at  the  capitals  of  the  subas.zo%  Some  of  the  dervishes 
were  also  expert  bow-makers.209  The  soldiers  and  their  officers  believed 
that  the  pirs'  spiritual  power  would  protect  them  against  enemy  arrows 
and  shots.  In  return  for  spiritual  support,  many  soldiers  and  their  officers 
donated  money  for  the  construction  of  mosques.210  Abul  Fazl  notes  that, 
when  the  Muslim  troops  loyal  to  the  Mogul  sovereign  died  while  fighting 
rebellious  Muslims,  then  the  former  achieved  martyrdom.211  How  far  this 
assertion  represented  the  actual  combat  ethos  of  the  loyal  Mogul  soldiery 
remains  an  open  question.  In  recent  times,  Rosalind  O'Hanlon  has  asserted 
that  Mogul  manliness  was  shaped  by  a  modified  version  of  the  Persian 
concept  of  javanmardi,  which  meant  displaying  courage  and  bravery  in 

203  Pinch,  Warrior  Ascetics  and  Indian  Empires,  pp.  5,  26-27,  46,  59,  65-66,  81, 185. 

204  Orr,  "Armed  Religious  Ascetics  in  Northern  India",  pp.  189, 192, 197. 

205  Sufis  and  Soldiers  in  Aurangzeb's  Decca,  p.  xxvii. 

206  Kumar,  "Politics,  the  Muslim  Community  and  Hindu-Muslim  Relations  Reconsidered". 

207  Digby,  "Dreams  and  Reminiscences  of  Dattu  Sarvani",  pp.  53,  56. 

208  Sufis  and  Soldiers  in  Aurangzeb's  Deccan,  pp.  3-4. 

209  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  p.  611. 

210  Digby,  Sufis  and  Soldiers  in  Aurangzeb's  Deccan,  pp.  10-11. 

211  The  Akbar-Nama,  I,  pp.  604-605. 


FROM  THE  MAMLUKS  TO  THE  MANSABDARS 


113 


imperial  service.  For  the  mounted  musketeers,  the  skill  of  shooting  from 
horseback  constituted  the  concept  of  being  a  "true"  mirza.zlz 

With  the  passage  of  time,  we  see  a  subtle  change  in  the  cultural  motiva- 
tions of  both  the  Muslim  and  Rajput  soldiery.  The  transformation  of  the 
cultural  ethos  was  related  to  the  changes  in  the  power  politics  of  the  real 
world.  Nothwithstanding  the  many  syncretic  and  inclusionist  dimensions  of 
medieval  Islamic  culture,  asserts  Rajat  Datta,  for  the  Islamic  conquerors  and 
their  ideologues,  Hindustan  was  a  land  of  kufr  or  infidels.213  During  the  thir- 
teenth century,  the  discourse  among  at  least  a  powerful  section  of  the  Muslim 
intellectuals  was  that jihad  on  part  of  the  righteous  sultan  was  necessary.  The 
jihad  was  directed  towards  despoiling  the  riches  of  the  temples,  killing  the 
Brahmans,  and  theoretically  giving  the  Hindus  the  option  of  death  or  Islam.214 
And  those  ghazis  (religious  soldiers)  who  fell  while  conducting/7/zac/became 
shahids  (martyrs).  When  Babur  fought  the  Rajputs  at  Khanwa,  by  giving 
the  call  of  jihad,  the  former  tried  to  rouse  the  combat  spirit  of  his  Muslim 
soldiery.  However,  when  the  multi-ethnic  Mogul  army  comprising  Muslim 
and  Hindu  (Rajput  and  Maratha)  soldiers  fought  the  Shia  Muslim  sultanates 
of  Deccan  (Bijapur  and  Golkunda),  the  policy  was  not  to  give  the  cry  of  jihad 
but  to  rouse  the  Muslim  soldiery  by  utilizing  the  power  of  the  Sufi  shaikhs. 
Similarly,  when  the  Rajputs  fought  the  Muslims  then  the  former  relied  on  the 
concept  of  dharmayuddha,  but  when  the  Rajputs  fought  in  the  Mogul  army 
they  strengthened  their  combat  ethos  by  harking  back  to  their  caste  pride 
as  soldiers.  In  such  circumstances,  the  Mogul  Padshah  was  equated  with 
Ram,  the  Kshatriya  hero  of  the  epic  Ramayana  who  waged  dharmayuddha.^ 

Conclusion 

Due  to  the  vast  demographic  resources  of  South  Asia  (if  one  wants,  then  one 
can  use  Dirk  Kolff's  term  "military  labour  market"),  military  conscription 
was  neither  necessary  nor  practised  in  Mogul  times.  Though  the  size  of  the 
Mogul  army  in  the  first  half  of  the  sixteenth  century  was  quite  big,  if  we 
take  into  account  the  vast  population  of  the  subcontinent,  then  the  military 
participation  ratio  was  quite  small.  Again,  military  service  in  South  Asia 
during  the  Mogul  and  British  eras,  unlike  in  western  Europe,  remained  a 

212  O'Hanlon,  "Manliness  and  Imperial  Service  in  Mughal  North  India". 

213  Datta,  "Introduction",  p.  4. 

214  Aquil,  "OnlslamandA'u/Hn  the  Delhi  Sultanate". 

215  Datta,  "Introduction",  p.  6. 


114 


KAUSHIK  ROY 


honourable  profession.  Small  farmers,  marginal  peasants,  and  share-croppers 
earned  more  by  joining  the  army,  and  low  castes  acquired  Kshatriya  status. 
In  certain  cases,  many  small  farmers  became  zamindars  after  a  successful 
military  career,  and  ambitious  zamindars  became  rajas  after  participating 
in  a  successful  campaign.  So  service  in  the  army  was  a  channel  for  upward 
mobility.  The  Mogul  army  was  not  a  rigid  structure  frozen  in  time,  but  a 
multi-dimensional  organization  that  evolved  with  age.  However,  certain 
fundamental  characteristics  of  the  Mogul  army  can  be  elaborated.  The  Mogul 
army  was  not  a  state  commission  force  but  a  coalition  of  forces  raised  and 
maintained  by  the  different  mansabdars  (Persian  and  Turani  adventurers, 
Hindu  chieftains,  etc.)  operating  under  the  overall  control  of  the  emperor. 
The  Mogul  army  was  not  a  national  or  Indian  (if  such  a  term  could  be  used 
at  all)  army.  The  army  did  not  recruit  just  from  the  territories  under  its 
control.  The  Mogul  army  was  a  multi-ethnic  and  multi-faith  entity  which 
drew  a  considerable  number  of  personnel  from  outside  its  territory.  From  the 
religious  perspective,  the  Mogul  army  comprised  Muslims,  Hindus,  and  some 
Christians.  As  regards  the  Muslims,  the  Mogul  nobility  consisted  of  both 
Shias  from  Persia  and  Sunnis  from  Turan  (Central  Asia).  Both  Hindus  (Rajputs 
from  Rajasthan  and  north  India  under  Akbar  and  the  Marathas  from  west 
India  from  Shah  Jahan's  reign  onwards)  and  Muslims  (mostly  Afghans  who 
settled  in  the  subcontinent,  i.e.,  Bihar  during  the  Delhi  Sultanate)  from  India 
were  recruited  in  the  army.  Rather  than  the  region's  level  of  monetization,  it 
was  politics  and  the  cultural  ethos  that  dominated  payment  of  the  soldiery 
(especially  the  higher  ranks).  Military  service  was  regarded  as  a  means  of 
becoming  a  landholder  or  to  expand  one's  patrimony.  Hence,  payment  in 
kind,  i.e.,  land  (except  in  the  case  of  Sher  Shah,  an  aberration  in  medieval 
India),  remained  dominant  in  the  period  under  review. 

However,  foreign  and  indigenous  mercenaries  and  especially  footmen 
were  paid  in  cash  for  most  of  the  time.  Even  in  the  heyday  of  the  mansabdari 
system,  the  professional  mercenary  form  of  military  employment  continued. 
The  Mogul  army  from  Babur  to  Aurangzeb  was  dependent  on  the  foreign  pro- 
fessional mercenaries  for  manufacturing  and  manning  gunpowder  weapons 
during  both  battles  and  sieges.  From  Babur  to  Akbar,  the  dependence  was 
on  the  Ottomans  and  Persians,  and  under  Aurangzeb  the  Moguls  relied  on 
west  European  Christians.  The  latter  development  was  due  to  a  global  shift 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  when  western  Europe  became  most  advanced  in 
the  production  and  deployment  of  cannons,  howitzers,  and  mortars.  In  the 
eighteenth  century,  the  mansabdari  system  was  replaced  by  the  regimental 
system,  the  latter  being  characterized  by  regular  cash  payment,  written 
regulations,  and  strict  discipline.  That,  however,  is  a  different  story. 


On  the  Ottoman  janissaries 
(fourteenth-nineteenth  centuries) 

Gilles  Veinstein 


The  janissaries  are  probably  one  of  the  most  famous  military  corps  in  world 
history.  Nevertheless,  they  were  only  a  part  of  the  Ottoman  army  and  not 
even  the  most  numerous  one.  At  any  period  in  the  Ottoman  history  they 
coexisted  with  a  series  of  other  military  units,  some  of  them  created  earlier 
(hence  the  name  oiyeni  geri,  meaning  "new  troops"),  others  emerging  in 
later  times.  All  of  these  corps  were  of  different  natures  as  regards  their 
modes  of  recruitment,  the  status  of  their  members,  their  specific  role  in 
war,  their  method  of  remuneration,  and  so  on.  I  shall  concentrate  on  the 
corps  (ocak)  of  the  janissaries.1  Over  several  centuries,  they  were  both  a 
cause  of  terror  and  a  source  of  admiration  for  the  West,  but  they  were  also 
a  danger  for  the  Ottoman  rulers  themselves,  due  to  their  tendency  to  rebel. 
Beyond  these  stereotypes,  one  has  to  keep  in  mind  that  they  did  not  offer 
only  one  face  during  all  their  long  history.  On  the  contrary,  they  were  in  a 
process  of  constant  change,  especially  as  far  as  their  recruitment  sources 
and  military  value  were  concerned. 

Origins 

The  janissaries  were  established  in  the  second  half  of  the  fourteenth  cen- 
tury, probably  under  the  reign  of  Sultan  Murad  I  (there  is  some  discussion 
on  this  point  as  well  as  on  the  origins  of  the  corps  in  general,  which  remain 
somewhat  obscure).2 

1  General  works  on  this  corps  include:  Weissman,  Les janissaires;  Uzungarfili,  Osmanli  devteti 
teskildtmdan  kapu  kulu  ocaklan;  Murphey,  Ottoman  Warfare,  7500-1700,  pp.  43-49,  "Yeni  qeri"; 
Veinstein,  "Le  janissaire  etl'islamologue".  Among  the  main  sources  that  I  shall  refer  to,  I  would 
also  like  to  mention  Petrosian,  Meferfe-/ kanun-iyenigeri  ocagi  tarihi;  Petrosian  gives  the  Russian 
translation  and  the  facsimile  of  the  manuscript  of  St  Petersburg,  cited  below  as  Kavdnin;  for  the 
Turkish  edition  of  another  copy  of  this  work,  see  Akgiindiiz,  "Kavanin-i  yeniceriyan-i  dergah-i 
ali".  On  this  work,  see  Fodor,  "Bir  Nasihatname  olarak  'kavanin-i  yeniceriyan'". 

2  Palmer,  "The  Origin  of  the  Janissary";  Papoulia,  Ursprung  und  Wesen  der  Knabenlese  im 
osmanischen  Reich,  pp.  74ft  (reviewed  by  I.  Beldiceanu-Steinherr  in  Revue  des  etudes  islamiques, 
36, 1  (1968),  pp.  172-176);  Beldiceanu-Steinherr,  "La  conquete  d'Andrinople  par  les  turcs";  Kaldy- 
Nagy,  "The  First  Centuries  of  the  Ottoman  Military  Organization". 


116 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


From  the  beginning,  the  janissary  corps  was  an  infantry  unit  and  a  standing 
army  (which  not  all  the  infantry  components  of  the  Ottoman  army  were). 
Furthermore,  its  members  were  not  free  men.  They  were  slaves,  even  if  of 
a  particular  kind:  they  were  slaves  of  the  sultan  (kapi  kulu,  hiinkdr  kulu).  I 
shall  return  to  the  origins  of  these  slaves.  Initially,  they  were  not  allowed 
to  get  married.3  Later,  at  the  beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century,  this  ban 
would  be  abolished  by  Sultan  Selim  I.  From  then  on,  there  would  be  two 
kinds  of  janissaries,  married  ones  and  bachelors.  Only  the  latter  would 
continue  to  live  in  the  rooms  {odd)  of  the  barracks.  There  is  no  doubt  that 
this  change  was  of  great  consequence  for  the  nature  of  this  army.  In  any 
case,  it  remained  common  for  the  janissaries  to  be  attracted  to  young  boys 
and,  more  particularly,  according  to  certain  sources  to  youngjewish  boys.4 
Of  course,  it  is  always  better  not  to  generalize  in  such  matters. 

Evolution 

If  we  try  to  define  their  military  role  more  precisely,  we  must  underline  the 
fact  that  it  evolved  significantly  over  time.  The  janissaries  were  not,  at  the 
beginning,  the  most  efficient  part  of  the  army  nor  the  true  instrument  of 
the  Ottoman  conquest  that  they  would  become  later  on.  Initially,  they  were 
mostly  imperial  bodyguards  who  aimed  to  protect  the  sovereign  and  to  give 
a  public  image  of  his  power  and  wealth  during  ceremonies,  very  much  in  the 
ancient  tradition  of  the  slave  guards  of  the  Muslim  princes.5  The  janissaries 
never  lost  this  part  of  their  duties.  Testimonies  from  different  periods  are 
available  showing  that  they  made  a  strong  impression  on  ambassadors  and 
other  foreign  visitors  with  their  splendid,  brightly  coloured  uniforms  and 
their  perfect  discipline  when  they  entered  the  second  yard  of  the  Topkapi 
Palace  for  official  receptions.6 

They  continued  to  be  bound  by  a  close  personal  tie  to  the  sultan,  under 
whose  direct  patronage  they  always  remained.  One  small  manuscript  in 
the  Vienna  Library  is  interesting  in  painting  a  vivid  picture  of  the  close 
relationship  between  the  sultan,  in  this  case  Suleyman  the  Magnificent, 
and  his  janissaries:  on  the  janissaries'  side,  they  hold  the  deepest  reverence 
which  did  not  prevent  them  from  making  repeated  and  excessive  financial 

3  According  to  a  proverb,  a  married  man  is  not  a  kul  for  the  sultan:  Kavdnin,  fol.  iov. 

4  See,  for  instance,  Capsali,  Seder Elyahu  Zuta,  I,  p.  82. 

5  Bosworth,  "Ghulam",  parts  I,  "The  Caliphate"  and  II,  "Persia". 

6  See,  among  many  examples,  Fresne-Canaye,  Le  voyage  du  Levant,  p.  62. 


ON  THE  OTTOMAN  JANISSARIES  (FOURTEENTH-NINETEENTH  CENTURIES) 


117 


demands;  on  the  sultan's  side,  there  is  an  authority  which,  under  certain 
circumstances,  may  become  unyielding,  but  which  also  gives  rise,  at  other 
times,  to  a  smiling  humour,  almost  friendly,  and  even  at  times  indulging 
in  jokes.7 

The  importance  of  the  janissaries  in  the  military  field  would  increase 
dramatically,  in  connection  with  two  factors:  first,  they  became  a  decisive 
tool  in  siege  warfare,  thanks  to  their  specific  ability  to  act  as  a  monolithic 
and  compact  block  in  the  final  assault.  The  second  and  probably  even 
more  decisive  factor  was,  following  the  example  of  the  Balkan  armies, 
the  progressive  adoption  of  firearms,  more  precisely  the  musket  (tiifeng), 
instead  of  traditional  weapons,  in  particular  bows  and  arrows,  starting 
from  the  beginning  of  the  fifteenth  century.  In  the  Ottoman  rulers'  mind, 
the  use  of  this  new  and  revolutionary  weapon  was  intended  to  remain  the 
monopoly  of  the  janissaries,  in  connection  -  one  can  imagine  -  with  their 
status  as  a  standing  army  under  the  direct  supervision  of  the  sovereign, 
which  gave  better  opportunities  for  both  training  and  control.  An  instruc- 
tor in  chief  (ta'Umhdneciba§i)  was  appointed  by  the  sultan.  In  fact  this 
monopoly  quickly  became  obsolete,  and  firearms  circulated  among  much 
larger  sections  of  the  population,  partly  because  of  quarrels  between  the 
various  members  of  the  Ottoman  dynasty.8 

The  number  of  janissaries  equipped  with  firearms  (tiifenkli,  tiifenk-enddz) 
began  to  increase  under  the  reign  of  Mehmed  II,  and  this  continued  under 
the  subsequent  reigns.  As  for  the  reign  of  Suleyman  the  Magnificent,  it  is  not 
clear  whether  the  tiifenk-enddz  were  more  numerous  or  even  whether  the 
use  of  tiifenk  was  generalized  among  the  janissaries.  The  same  sultan  was 
also  famous  for  having  expanded  the  state  arms  factories.  In  any  case,  the 
adoption  of  firearms  was  the  Ottoman  response  to  the  military  evolution 
of  its  enemies,  especially  the  Habsburg  troops,  who  proved  to  be  terribly 
efficient  with  their  excellent  guns  made  in  Germany. 

We  have  no  details  on  the  process  of  the  adoption  of  firearms  and  we 
know  nothing  about  the  reception  of  this  innovation  by  the  troops,  who 
had  already  demonstrated  their  corporatist  mind  as  well  as  their  propensity 
to  mutiny.9  It  remains  striking  in  this  respect  that,  as  late  as  the  year  1551, 
Suleyman  considered  it  necessary  to  request  the  aga,  the  head  of  the  janis- 

7  Vienna,  Osterreichische  Nationalbibliothek,  Turkish  Manuscripts,  no.  1815,  Kdnundme-i 
Sultan  Siileymdn  (Fliigel,  III,  p.  250)  [henceforth,  Kdnunndme]. 

8  Turan,  Sehzdde  Bayezid  Vak'asi,  pp.  83-96;  Inalcik,  "The  Socio-Political  Effects  of  the  Dif- 
fusion of  Fire-Arms  in  the  Middle  East". 

9  We  cannot  consider  the  success  of  this  change  of  arms  as  obvious  if  we  bear  in  mind  what 
the  Habsburg  ambassador,  Busbecq,  wrote  about  the  failure  of  the  vizier  Rustem  Pasha  when 


118 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


saries,  to  train  his  men,  so  that  -  the  sultan  says  -  "they  will  become  experts 
in  the  use  of  the  musket".10  Equally  striking  is  the  fact  that  the  sultan  is  said 
to  have  been  anxious,  at  each  of  his  visits  to  the  barracks  of  the  janissaries, 
to  see  all  the  officers  shooting,  according  to  their  hierarchical  order,  in  the 
training  area,  luxuriously  laid  out  by  the  same  sultan.11  In  this  context,  the 
act  of  shooting  appears  both  as  a  game  and  as  a  kind  of  rite,  expressing  the 
close  relationship  between  the  sultan  and  his  slaves. 

At  this  stage  of  their  evolution,  the  janissaries  were  no  longer  only  the 
personal  escort  of  the  sultan.  They  also  became  the  main  factor  in  the 
Ottomans'  military  superiority.  They  took  part  in  all  the  main  campaigns, 
both  on  land  and  at  sea,  even  in  the  absence  of  their  patron,  the  sultan. 
In  the  same  way,  they  were  the  elite  of  the  fortress  garrisons,  scattered 
throughout  the  empire. 

To  this  evolution  corresponds  a  spectacular  increase  in  their  numbers. 
Let  me  give  some  figures  to  give  an  idea  of  the  corps'  size. 

Figures 

However  hypothetical  they  may  be,  the  oldest  figures  remained  low: 
2,000  men  in  1389,  at  the  Battle  of  Kosovo;  3,000  under  the  reign  of  Murad  II, 
in  the  first  half  of  the  fifteenth  century.  Later,  they  would  increase  from 
5,000  to  10,000  men,  during  the  reign  of  Mehmed  II,  the  Conqueror  (fdtih), 
in  the  second  half  of  the  fifteenth  century.  This  increase  would  have  taken 
place  in  particular  during  Mehmed's  wars  with  the  Akkoyunlu  sultan  Uzun 
Hasan  in  the  1470s.  The  result  was  reached  partly  by  the  incorporation 
into  the  initial  janissary  corps  of  two  new  components  that  had  existed 
independently  until  then,  and  that  were  devoted  to  the  sultan's  hunting 
activity:  the  sekban  or  seymen  and  the  zagarci,  all  men  in  charge  of  the 
royal  hounds.  This  explains  the  puzzling  fact  that  several  of  the  highest 
officers  of  the  ocak  retained  designations  in  connection  with  hounds:  such 
were  the  sekban  ba§i,  the  zagarci  bast,  the  turnaci  ba§i,  the  samsuncu  bast. 

Still  later,  under  Mehmed's  son,  Bayezid  II,  the  number  of  the  janissaries 
would  reach  13,000.  To  this  end,  Bayezid  created  a  new  section  of  the  ocak: 

he  tried  in  1548  to  arm  with  pistols  200  horsemen  who  were  his  own  kuls;  see  Turkish  Letters, 
pp.  123-124. 

10  "Yenicerim  kullarim  tiifenk  atmaga  idman  eylemelerin  emr  ediib...":  Tokapi  Sarayi  Miizesi 
Kiitiiphanesi,  Manuscript KK888,  doc.  no.  30. 

11  Kdnunndme,  fols  13-16. 


ON  THE  OTTOMAN  JANISSARIES  (FOURTEENTH-NINETEENTH  CENTURIES) 


119 


the  so-called  companies  of  the  aga  {aga  boliikleri).  Nevertheless,  this  peak 
was  followed  by  a  marked  decrease  just  before  Suleyman's  reign,  but  things 
would  change  significantly  during  his  long  tenure  (1520-1566),  at  the  end  of 
which  their  numbers  stabilized  at  some  13,000  men,12  a  very  high  level  for  a 
standing  army  of  the  time.  Nevertheless,  one  of  the  most  recent  historians 
of  Ottoman  warfare,  Rhoads  Murphey,  has  dwelt  on  the  fact  that,  at  any 
one  time,  only  a  portion  of  the  total  ranks  were  actually  deployed  at  the 
front,  the  rest  being  confined  to  barracks  in  Istanbul  or  dispatched  among 
the  provincial  garrisons.13 

General  organization  and  command 

Before  going  further,  let  us  have  a  glimpse  at  the  general  organization  of 
the  janissary  corps  and  its  terminology:  its  structures  reflect  its  complex 
formation.  It  consists  of  three  main  components:  the  so-called  cema'at, 
which  is  composed  of  101  regiments  of  sekban  or  seymen.  Consequently  the 
total  number  of  the  orta  (also  called  boliik)  amounted  to  196  (which  became 
195,  when  Murad  IV  decided  to  disband  the  sixty-fifth  orta,  considered  to 
be  responsible  for  Osman  II 's  assassination).  At  the  head  of  each  orta  was 
a  gorbaci  (literally  a  "soup  maker").  Another  name  for  the  chiefs  of  the 
regiments  of  the  cema'at  wasyayaba§i  or  serpiydde  ("chief  of  the  infantry- 
men"). Each  gorbaci  had  a  lieutenant  (oda  kethiiddsi  or  ba§odaba§i)  under 
his  orders,  as  well  as  a  set  of  odaba§i  ("chiefs  of  barrack-rooms").  An  imam 
and  a  scribe  were  also  available  in  each  regiment. 

At  the  head  of  the  ocak  in  its  entirety  was  the  "aga  of  the  janissaries" 
(yenigeri  agasi).  Originally,  he  was  chosen  from  among  the  members  of 
the  corps,  but  after  Selim  I's  reforms  he  was  one  of  the  high  dignitaries  of 
the  Palace  and,  once  appointed,  he  became  the  first  of  the  so-called  rikdb 
agalari  ("agas  of  the  stirrup").  He  depended  directly  on  the  sultan,  with 
whom  he  had  a  close  relationship.  He  had  his  own  palace  in  the  vicinity 
of  the  Siileymaniye  mosque;  he  led  his  own  council,  the  so-called  yenigeri 
divdm.  This  council  included  the  five  highest  officers  of  the  corps,  four  of 
them  mentioned  above  in  connection  with  hounds  and  hunting:  the  aga's 
lieutenant  (kuL  kethiiddsi);  the  chief  of  the  sekbdn  who,  at  the  time,  was  the 
supreme  commander  of  the  corps;  the  zagarci  ba§i;  the  samsuncu  ba§i;  and 
the  turnaci  ba§i.  Each  of  these  high  officers  was  at  the  same  time  chief  of  a 

12  Murphey,  Ottoman  Warfare,  7500-7700,  p.  45. 

13  Ibid.,  p.  47. 


120 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


particular  orta.  Among  the  other  high  officers  who  were  not  members  of  the 
divan,  let  me  mention  the  muhziraga  ("bailiff  aga"),  who  was  the  intermedi- 
ary between  the  ocak  and  the  grand  vizier;  the  big  and  the  little  hdsseki  who 
were  dispatched  to  the  provinces  to  deal  with  questions  concerning  the 
corps;  the  ba§  gavu§  ("chief  of  the  sergeants")  who  checked  the  execution 
of  the  decisions  and  supervised  the  incorporation  of  new  recruits. 

Finally,  the  ocak  had  its  own  bureaucracy  headed  by  the yenic eri  efendisi 
("secretary  of  the  janissaries").  He  held  the  pay  rolls  (kotiik)  and  was  the 
chief  of  the  aga's  chancery. 

Increase  in  membership  and  subsequent  decline 

After  Suleyman's  era,  starting  from  the  reign  of  his  grandson,  Murad  III, 
the  number  of  janissaries  increased  dramatically  and  constantly.  At  the 
same  time,  standards  of  recruitment  became  more  and  more  slack  and 
the  origins  of  the  recruits  much  more  diversified.  The  recruitment  of  new 
janissaries  was  hence  no  longer  limited  to  slaves  of  the  sultan  nor,  according 
to  a  tradition  that  had  been  established  quite  early  on,  to  sons  of  janissaries. 
From  now  on,  all  kinds  of  foreigners  (ecnebi)  and  "intruders"  (saplama), 
including  Turks,  got  access  to  the  ocak,  against  the  fundamental  regulations. 
Thus,  the  corps  lost  its  former  homogeneity,  which  was,  according  to  several 
of  the  authors  of  "books  of  advice"  (nasihatndme),  a  cause  of  its  decline. 
The  same  authors  attributed  these  transformations  -  so  reprehensible  in 
their  eyes  -  to  the  sovereigns'  slovenliness  and  blindness.  Nevertheless, 
as  Murphey  underlines,  there  is  another  possible  interpretation  of  their 
behaviour:  they  would  have  been  trying  to  meet  growing  military  needs 
in  the  face  of  more  and  more  powerful  adversaries.  Be  that  as  it  may,  the 
burden  became  heavier  and  heavier  for  the  Treasury.  In  1574,  the  janissaries 
numbered  13,600;  they  amounted  to  35,000  in  1597,  37,600  in  1609,  and 
39,470  in  1670.  The  numbers  reached  53,000  at  the  beginning  of  the  eight- 
eenth century,  at  a  time  when  the  corps  had  lost  all  military  efficiency.14 
They  remained  merely  a  mighty  pressure  group  in  the  state  and  society, 
as  well  as  a  terrible  drag  on  the  public  finances,  all  the  more  so  because, 
starting  from  1740,  Sultan  Mahmud  I,  desperately  searching  for  money, 
legalized  the  marketing  of  certificates  (esdme)  which  gave  the  bearer  the 
right  to  collect  janissary  wages.  This  period  is  generally  considered  to  be  the 
time  of  decay  and  corruption  of  the  janissaries.  The  corps  played  a  central 


14   Aksan,  "Whatever  Happened  to  the  Janissaries?" 


ON  THE  OTTOMAN  JANISSARIES  (FOURTEENTH-NINETEENTH  CENTURIES) 


121 


role  in  the  overthrow  of  the  reforming  sultan,  Selim  III,  in  1808.  As  a  result, 
his  successor,  Sultan  Mahmud  II,  decided  to  abolish  the  corps  in  1826,  as  a 
necessary  precondition  to  the  introduction  of  Westernizing  reforms  in  the 
army.  When  the  janissaries  rose  in  revolt  against  this  decision,  the  sultan 
had  his  artillery  shoot  them  to  pieces  in  their  barracks  on  18  June  1826,  an 
incident  known  in  Turkish  history  as  the  "auspicious  event"  (vakayi  hayriye). 

After  this  general  background,  let  me  try  to  define  the  corps  according 
to  the  criteria  to  be  considered  in  the  framework  of  our  research  program. 

A  sultan's  army 

The  janissaries  were  clearly  a  state  commission  army  or,  to  be  more  ac- 
curate, a  sultan's  army.  Since  their  origin,  they  were  intended  for  the  sultan's 
exclusive  use  and  put  under  his  direct  patronage.  Even  in  the  later  period, 
when  they  became  a  part  of  the  state  apparatus  and  one  military  institu- 
tion among  others,  although  the  sovereign  no  longer  took  part  in  military 
campaigns  in  person,  they  kept  some  of  their  close  ties  with  him.  The  fact, 
for  example,  that  we  come  across  sultanic  orders  concerning  janissaries  or 
janissaries'  cadets  (who  will  be  discussed  below),  including  orders  deal- 
ing with  very  minor  affairs,  which  are  not  ordinary  fermans  but  edicts  of 
the  highest  rank  (hatt-i  hiimdyun,  which  means  that  they  were  issued  on 
the  basis  of  a  personal  note  written  by  the  sultan  with  his  own  hand  on 
the  paper  of  the  initial  request),  is  significant:  it  is  an  expression  of  the 
exceptional  status  of  these  kuls.15 

Pencyek  and  dev§irme 

At  the  beginning,  starting  from  the  fourteenth  century,  the  members  of 
the  corps  originated  from  a  single  source,  the  pencyek.16  This  Persian  term 
(Arabic:  khums)  refers  to  the  fifth  part  of  the  booty  gathered  during  the  raids 
and  the  fights  against  the  infidels  -  the  part  which,  according  to  Islamic  law, 

15  See,  for  example,  an  order  following  a  petition  concerning  the  graduation  of  janissaries' 
cadets  working  in  the  Ibrahim  Pasha  Palace  in  Istanbul,  with  the  note  "hatt-i  hiimayunumla 
fermdmm  olmushdur"  ("it  was  ordered  with  a  note  of  my  own  majestic  writing"):  Istanbul, 
Basbakanlik  Ottoman  Arsivleri,  Miihimme Defteri  [henceforth,  MD],  LXIV,  p.  42. 

16  Beldiceanu-Steinherr,  "En  marge  d'un  acte  concernant  le  pengyek  et  les  aqinci".  The  author 
gives  an  edition  of  the  important  regulation,  referred  to  below,  extracted  from  Bibliotheque 
nationale  de  France,  fonds  turc  ancient  81,  fol.  97r-v. 


122 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


belongs  to  the  sovereign.  This  booty  includes,  among  other  goods,  captives 
who  were  automatically  enslaved  by  those  who  took  them  (unless  they 
were  intended  to  be  ransomed).  In  fact,  it  appears  that  this  pencyek  could 
take  two  different  forms,  according  to  the  period  and  the  circumstances. 
On  the  one  hand,  it  could  be  a  simple  tax  of  25  akge  (silver  coins),  a  sum 
corresponding  to  the  fifth  part  of  the  average  value  of  a  slave  (i.e.,  125  akge). 
This  tax  was  levied  at  the  frontier,  at  the  point  of  the  slaves'  entrance  into 
Ottoman  territories.  In  this  form,  the  pencyek  survived,  with  or  without  the 
name,  until  the  nineteenth  century.  On  the  other  hand,  the  pencyek  was 
nothing  but  the  requisition,  mainly  on  behalf  of  the  sultan,  of  all  the  young 
male  captives,  between  ten  and  seventeen  years  old  (occasionally  even  older, 
but  in  that  case  the  sultan  had  to  pay  for  them),  who  had  been  enslaved  in 
raids  and  who  presented  the  required  features  of  robustness,  soundness, 
and  physical  integrity.  The  sources  describing  this  second  aspect  of  the 
pencyek,  crucial  for  the  janissaries'  history,  are  rare.  The  most  developed 
and  explicit  one  is  a  relatively  late  edict  issued  by  Sultan  Bayezid  II  in  1493, 
which  nevertheless,  as  the  text  points  out,  reformulates  older  provisions. 
On  another  side,  this  edict  takes  into  consideration  only  those  captives  who 
were  caught  during  raids  launched  in  the  enemy  territory.  Nevertheless, 
we  know  that  the  same  kind  of  young  captives  were  also  taken  in  other 
contexts  as  well:  successful  sieges  or  pitched  battles;  likewise  a  portion  of 
these  captives  -  and,  indeed,  the  best  portion  -  was  the  sultan's  own  loot. 

As  a  consequence  of  the  nature  of  the  pencyek,  the  janissaries  were 
initially  recruited  among  foreign,  non-Muslim  young  boys  (it  was  forbidden 
by  shari'a  to  enslave  Muslims,  except  in  extraordinary  cases  of  judiciary 
punishment).  It  corresponded  exactly  to  the  so-called  mamluk  paradigm  as 
it  had  been  in  force  in  the  Muslim  world  since  the  Abbasid  era.17  According 
to  this  paradigm,  which  corresponds  to  a  specific  kind  of  military  slavery, 
the  aim  was  not  to  enslave  already  mature  and  experienced  soldiers,  but  to 
search  for  untrained  and  inexperienced  young  boys  who  would  not  only  be 
enslaved  and  forcibly  converted  but  also  systematically  trained  in  special- 
ized schools.  Some  historians,  such  as  D.  Ayalon  and  E.  de  la  Vaissiere, 
assumed,  more  or  less  explicitly,  that  such  schools  may  have  originated 
from  Central  Asian  models.  It  is  worth  noting  that  in  the  account  of  the 
origins  of  the  janissaries  by  the  earliest  Ottoman  chroniclers,  in  the  second 


17  Ayalon,  "Preliminary  Remarks  on  the  Mamluk  Military  Institution  in  Islam";  Crone,  Slaves  on 
Horses;  Pipes,  Slaves,  Soldiers  and  Islam.  For  a  critical  discussion,  see  La  Vaissiere,  Samarcande 
et  Samarra. 


ON  THE  OTTOMAN  JANISSARIES  (FOURTEENTH-NINETEENTH  CENTURIES) 


123 


half  of  the  fifteenth  century,18  this  new  unit  appears  as  nothing  more  than 
the  byproduct  of  the  establishment  of  the  pencyek  levies  a  century  before. 

Much  more  specific  to  the  Ottoman  case  was  the  other  method  of  acquir- 
ing new  janissaries,  which  apparently  was  inaugurated  a  few  decades  after 
the  institution  of  the  pencyek.  This  second  method  partly  replaced  the  first 
one  after  a  time  of  coexistence  in  the  fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries.  It 
was  called  devsirme,  a  Turkish  term  meaning  "collecting"  or  "gathering",  by 
reference  to  the  levy  of  young  boys,  who  were  no  longer  foreign  captives 
caught  in  the  raids,  but  Christian  subjects  of  the  sultan.  They  were  dhimmt, 
non-Muslim  proteges  of  the  sultan,  who  had  lived  in  his  European  provinces. 
Later  on,  the  same  practice  was  also  put  in  force  in  Anatolia.  Young  Muslims, 
especially  Turks,  were  categorically  excluded  from  the  devsirme,  with  the 
exception  of  Muslim  Bosnians  who,  for  reasons  that  are  not  totally  clear, 
were  eligible  for  the  system.19 

The  earliest  mentions  of  devsirme  operations  go  as  far  back  as  the  very  end 
of  the  fourteenth  century.20  Nevertheless,  the  practice  seems  to  have  become 
more  regular  starting  from  the  second  quarter  of  the  fifteenth  century, 
under  the  reign  of  Murad  II.  In  spite  of  attempts  to  justify  this  institution 
from  a  legal  and  religious  point  of  view,21  it  was  an  obvious  violation  of 
two  fundamental  provisions  of  shari'a:  on  the  one  hand,  it  implied  the 
enslavement  of  dhimmt  subjects;  on  the  other,  the  levy  was  followed  by 
a  forcible  conversion,  since  all  these  Christian  boys  entering  the  sultan's 
service  had  to  become  Muslims. 

Volunteers  or  not? 

Under  such  conditions,  it  seems  at  first  glance  completely  unnecessary 
to  ask  whether  these  future  soldiers  were  volunteers  or  not.  Clearly,  the 
young  captives,  entering  the  sultan's  service  as  part  of  his  pencyek,  were 
not  volunteers.  As  for  the  devsirme,  records  are  extant  of  attempts  to  escape 
the  requisition  by  flight  or  concealment  of  the  boys,  at  the  approach  of  the 

18  Giese,  Die  altosmanische  Chronik  des  'Aslkpasaza.de,  Die  altosmanischen  anonymen  Chroni- 
ken  Tevdrih-iAl-i  'Os  man.. 

19  Menage,  "Devshirme",  and  Inalcik,  "Ghulam.  Ottoman  Empire";  Menage,  "Sidelights  on  the 
Devshirme";  Ozcan,  "Devsirme";  Papoulia,  Ursprung  und  Wesen  der Knabenlese  in  osmanischen 
Reich;  Petrosian,  "The  Mabda-i  Kanuni  yeniceri  ocagi  Tarihi  on  the  System  of  Devsirme". 

20  Vryonis,  "Isidore  Glabas  and  the  Turkish  Devshirme";  Demetriades,  "Some  Thoughts  on  the 
Origins  of  the  Devsirme". 

21  See  Wittek,  "Devshirme  and  Shari'a". 


124 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


recruiting  commissioners,  or  by  corruption  of  these  agents.  Again,  on  the 
way  from  their  homeland  to  Istanbul,  some  boys  tried  to  run  away;  this 
was  also  the  case  at  their  arrival  in  the  capital,  where  the  forced  conversion 
and  the  dispatching  of  the  recruits  took  place.  Later,  in  the  first  stages  of 
the  process  of  formation  that  I  shall  describe  below,  such  attempts  still 
occurred.22 

Nevertheless,  the  question  is  more  complex.  If  there  is  no  doubt  that  the 
dev§irme  was  generally  very  unpopular,  not  to  say  that  it  was  considered 
to  be  one  of  the  darkest  aspects  of  the  Turkish  yoke  (as  is  obvious  from 
Balkan  literature  and  folklore),23  on  the  other  side,  it  remains  true  that 
for  poor  people,  mostly  peasants,  it  was  also  gateway  to  a  better  life,  with 
better  incomes  and  a  better  social  position,  in  spite  of  the  strain  and  the 
danger.  It  was  true  for  a  simple  janissary,  and  much  more  so  for  the  cream 
of  the  kuls,  who  could  reach  the  highest  positions  in  the  state  apparatus. 
As  a  consequence  of  these  realities,  some  people  who,  being  Muslims,  were 
not  eligible  for  the  dev§irme,  made  efforts  to  enter  fraudulently,  to  the  great 
displeasure  of  the  authorities.  It  is  also  true  that  when  people,  after  the 
preliminary  stages,  became  full  members  of  the  corps,  they  do  not  seem 
to  have  been  inclined  to  desert.  In  other  words,  if  there  was  constraint,  it 
finally  turned  into  a  form  of  acceptance.  I  shall  return  to  possible  explana- 
tions for  this  acceptance. 

Moreover,  with  time,  and  this  evolution  can  be  traced  as  early  as  the 
beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century,  not  all  the  janissaries  were  the  products 
of  coercion,  as  in  the  pencyek  or  the  dev§irme  institutions.  Specifically,  as 
already  mentioned,  sons  of  janissaries  (kuloglus)  started  being  introduced 
into  the  corps,  and  the  same  was  applied  for  young  Muslims  adopted  by 
janissaries  (veledeshes).24  Likewise,  the  aga,  head  of  the  corps,  was  allowed 
to  incorporate  a  number  of  proteges.  In  all  these  cases,  entering  the  corps 
became  a  voluntary  act. 

In  the  same  way,  for  the  people  who,  according  to  Mustafa  Ali,  were 
admitted  in  the  corps,  by  the  will  of  Murad  III  in  1582  on  the  occasion  of  the 
great  circumcision  feasts  of  his  son  Mehmed,  this  admission  was  a  favour 
and  by  no  means  a  requirement.  With  all  these  changes  in  the  recruitment 
methods,  janissaries  passed  progressively  from  forced  recruits  to  volunteers. 

22  See,  for  instance,  Istanbul,  Bas,  bakanhk  Ottoman  Ar§  ivleri,  MD,  III,  p.  509,  no.  1514;  VI,  p.  135, 
no.  284;  IX,  p.  14;  XXI,  p.  145;  XXX,  p.  108. 

23  See,  for  example,  Georgieva,  "Le  role  des  janissaires  dans  la  politique  ottomane  en  les  terres 
bulgares". 

24  Kaldy-Nagy,  "The  Strangers  (ecnebiler)  in  the  16th  Century  Ottoman  Military  Organization". 


ON  THE  OTTOMAN  JANISSARIES  (FOURTEENTH-NINETEENTH  CENTURIES) 


125 


Searching  for  the  janissaries'  identity 

However,  it  remains  true  that,  during  the  most  glorious  period  of  the 
empire's  history,  mainly  during  the  fifteenth  and  the  first  part  of  the 
sixteenth  centuries,  the  Ottoman  conquest,  so  loudly  praised  as  a  triumph 
of  Islam,  was  in  fact  largely  operated  by  men  of  Christian  origin.  If  this 
paradox  was  already  encapsulated  in  the  "mamluk  paradigm",  it  takes  a 
particularly  striking  shape  in  the  janissaries'  case,  since  a  major  part  of 
the  conquests  concerned  were  to  the  detriment  of  Christian  lands.  When 
historians  look  for  an  explanation  of  this  paradox,  it  seems  that  they  have 
to  address  the  various  components  of  the  specific  culture  of  the  ocak.  All 
of  them  converge  into  the  making  of  a  new  identity,  strong  and  satisfying 
enough  to  substitute  for  the  old  one  (without  erasing  it  altogether).25  At  the 
root  of  this  identity  was  an  esprit  de  corps,  which  is  certainly  shared  by  all 
corps  but  which,  in  this  case,  reached  the  highest  degree  for  three  reasons 
at  least:  a  sharp  consciousness  of  being  part  of  a  military  elite  in  a  close 
relationship  with  the  sovereign  and  responsible  for  the  empire's  greatness; 
a  common  initiation  into  a  rich  corpus  of  symbols  (for  example,  each  orta 
had  its  own  emblem)  at  work,  in  a  series  of  rites,  ceremonies,  and  feasts;  and 
the  prominent  influence  of  Bektashism,  a  syncretic  form  of  Islam.  The  close 
tie,  even  the  symbiotic  connection,  between  the  ocak  and  this  Ottoman 
Sufi  order  (tarikat)  is  well  known,  even  if  the  exact  chronology,  causes,  and 
conditions  of  the  interface  between  the  two  communities  are  not  altogether 
clear.  Obviously,  for  chronological  reasons,  the  tradition  of  the  creation  of 
the  ocak  by  the  "saint",  Haci  Bektash  Veli,  founder  of  the  order,  cannot  be 
anything  but  a  legitimizing  legend.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  is  not  even  certain 
that  the  Bektashi  impact  moulded  the  corps  from  its  very  origin.  The  official 
affiliation  came  relatively  late,  not  before  the  year  1591,  during  the  reign 
of  Murad  III.  Starting  from  that  time,  the  great  master  of  the  order  (baba) 
became  the  gorbaci  of  the  ninety-ninth  orta,  and  Bektashi  dervishes  were 
incorporated  into  the  ocak  where  they  became  highly  influential  in  every 
field,  offering  spiritual  guidance  to  the  soldiers.26 

Nevertheless,  there  is  no  doubt  that  syncretic  beliefs  existed  in  the  reli- 
gion of  the  janissaries  a  long  time  before  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century, 
as  it  existed  in  the  early  stages  of  Ottoman  history  in  general.  Perhaps  we 
have  an  echo  of  these  beliefs,  as  they  were  in  force  in  the  second  half  of  the 

25  Uzuncarsih,  Osmanli  devleti  te§kildtmdan  kapu  kulu  ocaklart  ,  I,  pp.  26-28;  Vatin  and 
Veinstein,  "Paroles  d'oglan,  jeunes  esclaves  de  la  Porte". 

26  Kiiciikyalcin,  Turna'nm  Kalbi,  pp.  111-120. 


126 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


fifteenth  century,  in  the  puzzling  description  of  Islam  which  is  to  be  found 
in  the  first  pages  of  the  "memoirs  of  the  Serbian  janissary",  Konstantin 
Mihailovic.27  A  prominent  place  is  given  to  'Ali,  the  Prophet's  cousin  and 
son-in-law,  whom  he  would  have  explicitly  designated  as  his  successor 
(in  fact,  he  is  always  mentioned  in  the  giilbank,  the  specific  prayers  of  the 
janissaries).  These  Shiite  features  would  be  confirmed  later  by  a  special 
reverence,  not  only  for  Ali  and  his  holy  sword,  called  Zulfikar,  but  also  for 
his  two  martyr  sons,  Hasan  and  Hiiseyn.  At  the  same  time,  Konstantin  also 
quoted  Muslim  preachers  who  combined  an  expected  harshness  against 
Christians  with  a  more  surprising  love  for  Christ.  In  their  view,  Jesus  had 
not  been  crucified,  a  lookalike  being  killed  instead.  "Jesus  is  of  God's  spirit 
but  Mohammed  is  God's  emissary",  they  say,  along  with,  "What  is  Moham- 
med's will  that  is  also  Jesus'?"  This  reverence  for  Christ  was  interpreted  as  a 
consequence  of  the  Christian  origin  of  most  of  the  janissaries  at  that  time, 
but  a  definitive  conclusion  on  the  question  remains  out  of  reach.  Anyway, 
it  is  not  certain  that  it  persisted  in  the  later  periods,  while  Shiite  inspiration 
definitely  did.  How  could  Ottoman  power,  having  been  transformed  into  a 
champion  of  Sunnism  in  the  meantime,  tolerate  this  deviation  in  its  military 
elite?  It  is  another  paradox  of  the  janissaries.  Maybe  the  fact  that  this  Shiite 
imprint  was  nevertheless  encapsulated  in  a  tarikat,  which  obviously  was  a 
heterodox  one,  but  at  the  same  time  firmly  controlled  by  the  state,  by  means 
of  its  centralization  and  hierarchical  structure,  made  things  easier.28  Be  that 
as  it  may,  a  degree  of  Shiism  remained  one  of  the  peculiarities  of  the  ocak's 
culture  as  well  as  a  unifying  factor  for  its  members. 

Slaves  paid  in  silver 

As  I  noted  at  the  beginning,  janissaries  were  not  free  men.  They  were  slaves 
and  remained  so  all  their  life.  Their  patron,  the  Ottoman  sultan,  never 
emancipated  them  (or  very  exceptionally,  as  a  reward  for  extraordinary 
acts),  in  contrast  to  the  mamluk  sultans  of  Egypt  who  solemnly  emancipated 
their  own  mamluks  at  the  end  of  their  training  period  in  the  barracks  of 
the  citadel  of  Cairo.  At  any  rate,  they  were  slaves,  but  slaves  of  the  sultans, 
which  made  a  big  difference  in  comparison  to  ordinary  slaves.  As  several 
Western  travellers  noticed,  there  was  not  a  more  honourable  position  in 

27  Mihailovic,  Memoirs  of  a Janissary,  pp.  3-27;  the  French  translation  is  Mihailovic,  Memoires 
d'un  janissaire. 

28  Faroqhi,  "Conflict,  Accommodation  and  Long-Time  Survival",  pp.  19-20. 


ON  THE  OTTOMAN  JANISSARIES  (FOURTEENTH-NINETEENTH  CENTURIES) 


127 


the  empire  than  to  be  slave  of  the  sultan.  The  kul  elite  (of  course,  neither 
simple  janissaries  nor  the  corps  officers  but  kuls  who  had  become  governors 
or  viziers)  married  princesses  of  the  reigning  dynasty.  They  were  never  sold 
to  private  persons  and  were  thus  not  in  danger  of  being  used  for  menial 
tasks.  Not  only  could  they  exert  the  highest  functions,  but  they  were  also  in 
a  position  to  accumulate  greater  or  lesser  fortunes  and,  according  to  their 
status,  totally  or  partly  bequeath  them  to  their  heirs. 

All  these  slaves  were  paid  in  silver  money  by  the  Treasury.  This  point  may 
explain  -  at  least  in  part  -  the  fact  that  the  Ottoman  beys  took  some  time  to 
adopt  a  troop  of  this  type,  even  though  it  was  a  piece  of  their  Islamic  inherit- 
ance: they  needed  to  have  reached  a  sufficient  measure  of  monetization.  As 
a  matter  of  fact  none  of  the  previously  established  other  troops  were  paid 
in  money.  As  for  the  janissaries,  the  initial  pay  ('ulufe)  was  2  akge  per  diem. 
But  this  amount,  still  very  modest  indeed,  increased  with  time,  through  a 
succession  of  augmentations  (terakki),  and  could  reach  12  akge  for  a  simple 
soldier.  The  concrete  mechanism  of  these  increases  is  not  altogether  clear: 
we  cannot  determine  the  roles  of  the  military  value  to  be  rewarded  and 
stimulated,  of  the  length  of  service,  or  of  favouritism.  Officers'  wages  were 
much  higher.  The  aga's  reached  the  enormous  amount  of  400  akge  daily.  It 
is  possible  to  see  how  the  amounts  varied  through  the  numerous  payroll 
muster  lists  (mevdcib  defteri)  kept  in  the  archives.29 

Janissaries  were  paid  in  regular  quarterly  instalments,  in  solemn  cer- 
emonies in  the  second  yard  of  the  Topkapi  Palace.  As  for  the  provincial 
garrisons,  their  wages  were  transported  across  the  country  with  a  security 
guard.  Nevertheless,  this  precious  load  was  sometimes  attacked  by  bandits 
-  this  could  happen  even  at  the  apogee  of  the  empire,  during  Suleyman's 
reign.30  Any  shortcoming  in  these  payments  (as  occurred  in  the  so-called 
sivi§  years,  the  "effaced"  years  resulting  from  the  gap  between  the  solar 
and  the  lunar  calendars)31  or  any  adulteration  of  the  distributed  money 
led  to  riots  among  the  troops.  Besides  these  regular  wages,  they  received  a 
special  bonus  (bakh§i§)  at  every  new  enthronement.  Extraordinary  grants 
were  also  expected  during  the  campaigns,  as  an  incitement  or  a  reward.  To 
neglect  these  traditional  grants  was  a  serious  risk  for  the  sultan.  Selim  II 
experienced  the  consequences  when  he  refused  to  give  the  bakh§i§  to  the 
janissaries  at  the  beginning  of  his  reign,  as  did  Osman  II  who,  among  other 


29  Darling,  "Ottoman  Salary  Registers  as  a  Source  for  Economic  and  Social  History". 

30  Barkan,  "H.  974-975  (M.  1567-1568)  Mali  bir  Yilina  ait  bir  Osmanh  Biitcesi". 

31  Sahillioglu,  "Osmanh  Imparatorlugunda  Sivis,  Y1I1  Burhanlan". 


128 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


foolish  mistakes,  was  not  generous  enough  during  the  Polish  campaign, 
resulting  in  his  being  deposed  and  in  the  end  in  his  death.32 

These  official  allocations  were  not  the  only  source  of  income  for  the 
janissaries.  It  is  well  known  that  they  were  also  involved  in  craft  and  com- 
mercial activities,  mainly  in  the  capital  itself  and  also  in  the  various  cities 
where  they  were  sent  (as  a  way  of  getting  rid  of  them  in  troubled  times). 
Contrary  to  what  has  often  been  put  forward,  this  passage  from  military  to 
economic  activities  did  not  occur  exclusively  during  the  period  of  decline. 
It  already  existed  in  former  centuries.  However,  in  these  earlier  periods, 
crafts  and  trades  were  only  occupations  during  the  winter  or  the  intervals 
of  peace,33  and  not  a  substitute  for  military  involvement,  as  it  became  the 
case  later  on.  From  this  point  on,  close  ties  were  created  between  the  ocak 
and  the  guilds  of  the  capital. 

Consequently,  janissaries  succeeded  in  accumulating  properties  that 
they  left  to  their  heirs.  The  countless  probate  inventories  of  janissaries, 
which  are  to  be  found  in  the  kadi  registers  of  many  cities,  provide  precise 
data  on  this  point.  Both  soldiers  and  businessmen  -  in  proportions  varying 
according  to  the  period  -  could  join  a  quite  prosperous  urban  middle  class.34 

Trainees  without  much  training 

Returning  to  the  military  activity  of  the  janissaries,  the  question  arises 
as  to  what  extent  they  have  to  be  considered  true  professional  militaries, 
who  are  not  only  endowed  with  a  practical  experience  of  the  job  but  who 
had  been  systematically  trained  in  a  preliminary  stage  of  education,  as  the 
"mamluk  paradigm"  postulated  it. 

According  to  my  sources,  at  the  very  beginning,  the  boys  recruited  in  the 
framework  of  the  pencyekwere  directly  assigned  to  the  janissary  corps  with 
an  initial  wage  of  2  akge  per  diem.  In  other  words,  they  were  immediately 
operational  without  a  preliminary  training  period.35  However,  this  situation 
did  not  last.  A  few  decades  later,  a  new  corps  was  established,  the  so-called 
'acemi  oglan  (literally  "the  foreign  boys")  based  in  the  harbour  of  Gelibolu 
(Gallipoli)  on  the  Dardanelles.  A  second  branch  of  this  corps,  much  larger 

32  Vatin  and  Veinstein,  Le  serail  ebranle,  pp.  221-224,  338-340. 

33  Murphey,  "Yeni  ceri".  On  the  relationships  between  the  janissaries  and  the  corporations 
(esndf),  see  Kafadar,  "Yeniceri-Esnaf  Relations". 

34  Barkan,  "Edirne  Askeri  Kassamina  ait  Tereke  Defterleri";  Oztiirk,  Askeri  kassama  ait 
onyedinci  asir Istanbul  tereke  defterleri. 

35  Kavdnin,  fol.  4v. 


ON  THE  OTTOMAN  JANISSARIES  (FOURTEENTH-NINETEENTH  CENTURIES) 


129 


in  number,  would  be  created  in  Istanbul,  following  the  conquest  of  the  city. 
The  'acemi  oglan  was  meant  to  be  a  preliminary  stage  in  janissary  training. 
From  now  on,  it  was  no  longer  possible  to  enter  the  corps  immediately.  One 
had  to  be  an  'acemi  oglan  first. 

Before  examining  what  the  real  function  of  this  cadet  corps  was,  I  have 
to  mention  another  preliminary  stage,  an  initial  one,  which  took  place 
between  the  levy  as  pencyek  or  dev§irme  boy  and  the  incorporation  into 
the  'acemi  oglan.  This  first  stage  was  carried  out  in  the  countryside,  among 
Turkish  farmers  (Turk  iizerinde  olmak).  The  principle  was  to  establish  the 
young  recruits  "overseas",  so  that  no  flight  to  their  homelands  -  a  common 
temptation  -  was  possible.  That  means  that  Rumelian  boys  were  sent  to 
Anatolia.  Logically,  the  reverse  (Anatolian  boys  sent  to  Rumelia)  must  have 
been  true,  but  I  have  not  come  across  evidence  for  this.  This  stay  in  the 
countryside  was  of  quite  a  long  duration:  four  to  eight  years,  according  to 
the  sources.  Nevertheless,  it  could  be  shortened  when  boys  were  needed  for 
an  urgent  task  in  the  capital.  This  rural  stage  did  not  exist  initially  and  is 
said  to  have  been  established  by  Mehmed  II.36  A  first  aim  was  to  make  the 
boys  stronger  by  using  them  in  hard  labour,  as  well  as  to  accustom  them  to 
obedience  and  submission,  but  another  important  goal,  which  Mehmed  II 
would  have  had  in  mind,  was  to  allow  them  to  learn  Turkish.  Consequently, 
'acemi  oglan  and  janissaries  would  speak  Turkish  (certainly,  writing  in 
Turkish  was  another  story,  and  the  janissaries'  literacy  another  question). 
According  to  some  sources,  the  rural  stage  was  also  an  opportunity  for 
those  converted  to  be  initiated  into  the  basis  of  their  new  religion  (even 
if  Anatolian  peasantry  were  not  an  authority  in  these  matters).  It  appears 
that  this  period  staying  "among  the  Turks"  did  not  survive  as  long  as  the 
dev§irme  system:  it  was  no  longer  in  force  after  the  dev§irme  campaigns  of 
1622  and  1636.37 

Now,  if  we  come  back  to  the  'acemi  oglan,  we  are  naturally  inclined 
to  consider  the  period  spent  in  this  body  of  cadets  as  a  time  of  military 
preparation  and  training.  Consequently,  the  fate  of  an  'acemi  oglan  would  be 
necessarily  to  become  a  full  janissary.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  they  are  frequently 
called yeniceri  oglanlari  (or  in  Persian  gilmdn-iyenigeriydn),  which  means 
boys  who  are  janissaries-to-be.  Consequently,  all  studies  on  the  janissaries, 
including  the  most  recent  ones,  consider  the  'acemi  oglan  to  be  a  cadet  corps 


36  Ibid.,  fol.  7r. 

37  Uzungar^ili,  Osmanti  devteti  te§kUdtmdan  kapu  kulu  ocaktari ,  p.  24. 


130 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


or  trainees  in  connection  with  the  janissaries.38  However,  this  interpretation 
needs  discussion  and  nuancing. 

First,  I  shall  observe  that  the  oldest  traditions  did  not  explain  the  creation 
of  the  new  corps  in  that  way.  The  sultan  took  this  measure  -  they  say  -  first 
to  save  money,  since  the  initial  wages  of  the  'acemi  oglan  were  less  than 
those  of  the  janissaries  (1  akge  instead  of  2);  secondly,  because  he  lacked 
a  regular  corps  intended  for  a  specific  need:  transporting  troops  in  ships 
from  the  Asiatic  to  the  European  parts  of  the  state  across  the  Dardanelles.39 

Now,  taking  these  two  preliminary  stages  into  account,  we  can  try  to 
evaluate  the  number  of  years  coming  before  the  proper  entrance  into  the 
janissary  corps:  the  stay  in  the  Turkish  families  is  said  to  last  possibly  seven 
or  eight  years.  Afterwards,  the  time  spent  as  an  'acemi  oglan  is  said  to  be 
about  five  to  ten  years.  Thus,  the  total  time  of  these  preliminary  stages 
would  be  from  twelve  to  eighteen  years.  According  to  the  "treaties  of  advice" 
(naslhatname)  of  the  late  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  a  period 
of  fifteen  to  twenty  years  was  an  optimum.  In  one  of  these  works,  the 
kitab-i  mustetab,  the  'acemi  oglan  period  is  presented  as  even  longer  and 
divided  into  two  parts:  a  six  to  seven-year  period  properly  as  an  'acemi 
oglan,  followed  by  a  five  to  ten-year  period  as  gardeners  (bostancis)  of  the 
imperial  palaces. 

In  any  case,  all  these  figures  remain  highly  theoretical.  We  know  through 
orders  contained  in  the  "registers  of  important  affairs"  (miihimme  defteri) 
that  these  stages  could,  in  fact,  be  either  shortened  or  extended  considerably, 
according  to  the  circumstances.40  On  this  point  as  on  many  others,  Ottoman 
authorities  were  fully  pragmatic. 

Be  that  as  it  may,  it  remains  true  that  enlistment  in  the  janissary  corps 
did  not  occur  very  early  in  a  man's  life.  Janissaries  were  not  young  men.  It  is 
all  the  more  true  that  the  dev§irme  recruiters  did  not  take  the  boys  as  young 
as  it  is  frequently  assumed.  According  to  a  specific  law  (kanun)  dedicated  to 
the  institution,41  the  ages  were  between  fourteen  or  fifteen  and  seventeen 
or  eighteen  years  (remembering  that  for  the  pencyek  boys  the  age  was  ten 
to  seventeen  years).  In  practice,  the  recruits  could  be  even  older;  at  least 
this  was  the  case  in  a  dev§irme  register  of  the  beginning  of  the  seventeenth 

38  Still  today,  in  the  Turkish  army,  acemilik  means  the  training  period. 

39  Kavdnin,  fbl.  sr. 

40  For  example,  KK888,  no.  1603;  MD,  VI,  p.  223,  no.  479;  VII,  p.  789,  no.  2157;  IX,  pp.  14  and  122; 
XXI,  p.  145;  LIII,  p.  173.  It  remains  true  that,  when  the  authorities  had  to  urgently  remove  the 
boys  from  the  Turkish  families,  they  were  ordered  to  choose  the  ones  who  had  been  there  for 
the  longest  time  (eski). 

41  Akgiindiiz,  "Kavanin-i  yeniceriyan-i  dergah-i  ali",  II,  pp.  123-127. 


ON  THE  OTTOMAN  JANISSARIES  (FOURTEENTH-NINETEENTH  CENTURIES) 


131 


century.42  We  find  that,  at  that  time,  80  per  cent  of  the  boys  were  between 
fifteen  and  twenty  and  50  per  cent  between  eighteen  and  twenty  years 
old.  If  we  take  all  these  figures  into  account  -  however  hypothetical  they 
may  remain  -  we  come  to  the  puzzling  conclusion  that,  when  becoming  a 
janissary,  the  man  was  somewhere  between  thirty-seven  and  fifty  years, 
which  is  hardly  believable. 

Let  us  add  here  that,  once  a  janissary,  the  man  would  spend  his  whole 
career  in  the  corps,  unless  he  was  upgraded  to  a  more  prestigious  corps,  i.e., 
one  of  the  standing  cavalry  sections  or  one  of  the  Palace  corps,  or  acquired 
fief  (timar)  in  the  province,  which,  at  least  in  certain  cases,  was  considered 
a  punishment  and  not  a  promotion.  Finally,  when  a  janissary  was  judged 
too  old  (ziydde  ihtiyar),  exhausted,  and  "out  of  use"  ('amelmande),43  he  was 
retired  (oturak,  korucu,  emekddr)  and  continued,  as  such,  to  belong  to  the 
corps,  being  given  a  pension.  Such  a  pension  (pturaklik)  was  also  given  to  a 
soldier  who  became  ill,  disabled,  or  insane.  The  marked  reverence  for  the 
old  retired  soldiers,  among  the  members,  can  be  counted  among  the  signs 
of  this  esprit  de  corps  that  I  emphasized  above. 

If  there  was  a  long  time  between  the  first  recruitment  and  the  final 
entrance  into  the  janissary  corps  (kapuya  gikmak),  this  time  does  not  appear 
to  be  a  time  of  military  training  sensu  stricto.  There  was  nothing  to  be 
compared  to  the  several-year,  methodically  organized  training  existing 
in  the  Cairo  barracks  of  the  mamluk  sultans,  according  to  the  historian 
Makrizi.44 

A  glance  at  the  mamluks'  training 

Let  us  remember  that  in  the  fifteenth  century,  there  were  twelve  barracks 
(tibdq,  pi.  tabaqd)  in  Cairo  for  the  education  of  the  "royal  mamluks"  (al- 
mamalik  al-sultdniyya)  who  had  to  become  first-class  horsemen.  Each 
barrack  was  capable  of  accommodating  1,000  mamluks.  There  was  at  least 
one  religious  man  (faqih)  per  group  of  students  to  teach  them  the  Qur'an, 
the  Arabic  script,  some  basic  knowledge  of  shari'a,  and  the  Muslim  prayers. 
When  the  mamluks  who  had  been  bought  quite  young  reached  major- 
ity, they  started  their  actual  military  training.  Each  group  had  a  cavalry 

42  Istanbul,  Basbakanhk  Ottoman  Arsivleri,  Maliyeden  miidevver,  no.  7600. 

43  Kdnunndme,  fbl.  i6r. 

44  Ayalon,  "Preliminary  Remarks  on  the  Mamluk  Military  Institution  in  Islam",  pp.  9-17;  Rabie, 
"The  Training  of  the  Mamluk  Faris". 


132 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


[furusiyyd]  instructor,  a  mu'allim,  whose  training  included  equestrianism, 
the  lance  game,  archery,  and  fencing.  Tuition  in  horsemanship  consisted 
of  several  stages  before  the  young  man  was  able  to  sit  firmly  on  a  bareback 
horse.  At  the  beginning  he  practised  on  horse  models  made  of  dry  clay, 
stone,  or  wood.  The  first  exercise  was  to  jump  over  it  correctly.  Then  a  saddle 
was  placed  on  the  model  and  the  mamluk  practised  jumping  without,  and 
then  with,  full  equipment.  In  the  following  stage,  the  candidate  practised 
training  on  a  live  horse. 

During  his  whole  training,  the  mamluk  was  considered  a  simple  student 
(kuttdbiya)  without  pay  or  personal  goods  of  any  kind.  On  the  other  hand, 
when  his  education  was  over  (disregarding  how  many  years  it  lasted  and 
what  age  he  had  reached  at  this  point),  he  received,  as  personal  property,  a 
horse,  and  clothing,  as  well  as  a  set  of  arms  (a  bow,  a  quiver  and  arrows,  a 
sabre,  and  armour).  From  that  moment  on,  he  was  a  true  soldier,  eligible  for 
a  wage,  although  it  was  of  course  the  lowest  one.  In  addition,  he  was  given 
a  certificate,  called  'itdqa,  which  is  not  only  proof  that  he  had  become  a 
trained  horseman  but  also  as  a  mark  of  emancipation,  since  the  mamluk 
who  at  last  enters  the  sultan's  service  is  no  longer  his  slave.  He  was  a  free 
man  even  if  he  maintained  a  close  link  with  his  former  patron.  Thus,  two 
important  differences  with  the  janissaries  are  to  be  noticed:  the  latter 
remained  slaves  and  did  not  receive  real  military  training. 

Back  to  the  Ottoman  trainees 

As  long  as  the  Rumelian  boys  lived  with  Anatolian  Turkish  families,  they 
had  to  engage  in  livestock  farming  and  agriculture,  both  tiresome  chores 
(beld)  which  certainly  made  them  stronger  as  well  as  more  docile,  giving 
them  the  opportunity  to  develop  qualities  already  taken  into  account  by 
the  dev§irme  recruiters  upon  selection.  Such  qualities  may  be  necessary 
preconditions  of  military  capacity,  but  they  are  not  a  substitute  for  military 
technical  training.  Furthermore,  the  'acemi  oglan  stage  does  not  seem  to 
offer  much  military  training  either.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  all  these  young 
men  were  employed  by  the  sultan,  his  family,  and  other  grandees  in  a  great 
variety  of  tasks  that  had  nothing  to  do  with  proper  military  work. 

As  we  saw  above,  their  initial  duty  was  to  work  on  the  ships  coming  across 
the  Dardanelles,  as  well  as  to  transport  heavy  material  (torba  hizmeti).  The 
same  kind  of  tasks  were  ordered  for  the  Istanbul  'acemi  oglan  as  well,  for 
ships  coming  across  the  Bosphorus,  carrying  different  sorts  of  provisions  for 
the  imperial  palace,  such  as  firewood  or  snow  collected  in  the  mountains 


ON  THE  OTTOMAN  JANISSARIES  (FOURTEENTH-NINETEENTH  CENTURIES) 


133 


around  Bursa.  Domestic  service  in  several  palaces  was  also  partly  carried 
out  by  some  contingents  of  'acemi  oglan.  Another  of  their  major  occupations 
was  to  care  for  the  imperial  gardens  in  Istanbul  and  the  surrounding  areas 
as  well  as  in  Edirne  and  its  district.  For  instance,  in  1577,  some  467  'acemi 
oglan  were  employed  as  gardeners  in  Edirne.45  Another  possible  destina- 
tion of  the  recruits,  probably  in  connection  with  some  inborn  gifts  quickly 
discovered  by  the  recruiters,  was  to  become  apprentices  in  the  workshops 
of  the  Palace  and  thus  to  acquire  high-level  skills  in  one  of  the  many  crafts 
intended  for  the  sultan's  consumption  and  use.  Thus  in  a  list  of  1526,  we  find 
former  dev§irme  or  pencyekboys  in  twenty-six  of  the  forty  workshops  of  the 
Palace.46  Likewise,  when  the  sultan  undertook  the  building  of  a  new  monu- 
ment, either  a  civil  or  a  religious  one,  he  naturally  resorted  to  his  'acemi 
oglan.  For  instance,  we  find  them  on  the  Selimiye  mosque  construction  in 
Edirne.47  In  the  same  way,  they  contribute  to  shipbuilding  in  the  shipyards 
of  Galata:  many  boys  were  mobilized  after  the  destruction  of  the  Ottoman 
fleet  in  Lepanto.48  The  authorities  had  the  same  reaction  when  a  big  fire 
devastated  the  capital.49  In  short,  the  'acemi  oglan  appear  to  be  more  slave 
manpower  at  the  disposal  of  the  sultan  to  meet  the  various  needs  of  the 
Palace  and  the  state  than  a  cadet  corps  for  a  professional  army.  A  famous 
passage  of  the  third  of  Busbecq's  Turkish  Letters  has  to  be  interpreted,  at 
least  partly,  as  an  allusion  to  the  'acemi oglan:  "If  the  State  requires  any  work 
of  construction,  removal,  clearance  or  demolition,  slave  labour  is  always 
employed  to  carry  it  out."50 

It  is  also  true  that  a  proportion  of  'acemi  oglan  will  never  become  janis- 
saries. They  will  spend  their  entire  carrier  until  their  retirement  as  cadets, 
though  not  without  an  increase  in  their  daily  wages  in  time.  'Acemi  oglan 
with  grey  hair  and  beards  are  mentioned,  in  particular  among  the  garden- 
ers.51 Why  this  inertia  in  the  graduation?  Perhaps  because  they  became 
so  good  in  their  speciality  that  it  would  have  been  a  pity  to  let  them  leave 
their  job,  or  simply  because  they  were  forgotten,  the  authorities  always 
remaining  anxious  to  limit  the  number  of  janissaries,  partly  at  least  for 
financial  reasons. 

45  MA  XXX,  p.  108. 

46  Veinstein,  "A  propos  des  ehl-i  hiref  et  du  dev§irme". 

47  MD,  IX,  p.  46,  no.  122;  XXII,  p.  206. 

48  "Afe  kadar dolgerlikve  kalafdtcdik san'atim  bUiirve  sa'ir  tersdneye  mute'allik san'at biliir oglan 
var  ise...":  MD,  X,  p.  235. 

49  MD,  LIII,  p.  173. 

50  Turkish  Letters,  pp.  101-102. 

51  MD,  X,  p.  158,  no.  240;  LVI,  p.  66,  no.  134:  "nicesinin  sag  ve  sakalli  ankarib  pir  olmusdur". 


134 


GILLES  VEINSTEIN 


These  assertions,  however,  maybe  somewhat  too  categorical  and  deserve 
some  nuance.  I  cannot  deny  that  one  finds  here  and  there  some  hints  of 
military  training  of  the  'acemi  oglan.  This  is  the  case  in  an  important  source 
of  the  late  fifteenth  and  early  sixteenth  centuries,  the  report  of  Teodoro 
Spandougino  Cantacusino  (Spandounes),  according  to  which: 

Apres  qu'ilz  les  auront  oste  de  ce  meschant  mestier,  ilz  leur  font 
apprendre  a  tirer  de  l'arc  et  des  dards.  Aprez,  ils  les  despartent  a  divers 
capitaines  a  ce  qu'ilz  appreignent  l'exercice  des  armes  et  aulcuns  d'eux 
les  mectent  sur  la  mer.52 

In  the  same  way  a  later  traveller,  Gilles  Fermanel,  wrote  in  1630-1632: 

Les  Azamoglans  qui  sont  en  grand  nombre,  apres  avoir  long-temps 
servy  aux  jardinages,  estant  d'aage  colmpetent,  sont  exercez  a  tirer  de 
l'arquebuze,  et  apres  sont  faits  Janisiaires.53 

Such  mentions  coming  from  Western  sources  are  not  corroborated,  as  far 
as  I  know,  by  Ottoman  sources.  Moreover,  the  picture  that  they  give  of  the 
facts  sounds  like  an  attempt  at  rationalization,  which  does  not  correspond 
to  the  more  complex  reality  that  I  have  hinted  at,  with  a  variety  of  situations 
and  fates  for  the  boys.  Be  that  as  it  may,  even  if  some  training  did  exist,  at 
least  for  a  part  of  the  'acemi  oglan,  it  was  certainly  but  a  minor  part  of  these 
state  slaves'  agenda. 

Under  these  conditions,  it  was  mainly  through  their  experience  on  the 
field,  and  the  lessons  given  to  them  by  their  veterans,  that  the  janissaries 
learned  how  to  fight.  As  a  consequence,  extended  periods  of  peace,  like 
during  some  of  the  eighteenth  century,  could  not  help  but  have  a  negative 
impact  on  their  military  value. 


52  Spandouyn  Cantacasin,  Petit  traicte  de  I'origine  des  Turcqz,  p.  104. 

53  Fermanel,  Le  voyage  d'ltatie  et  du  Levant,  p.  76. 


Soldiers  in  Western  Europe,  c.  1500-17901 

Frank  Tallett 


Particularly  after  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth  century,  when  armed 
forces  grew  exponentially,  armies  typically  ranked  as  the  largest  single 
employers  within  states.  Thus,  soldiers  constituted  the  most  numerous 
unified  labour  force  within  Europe.  A  consideration  of  troops  within  the 
framework  of  labour  history  is  accordingly  both  appropriate  and  also  long 
overdue,  especially  since  in  certain  circumstances  soldiers  acted  very 
much  like  modern  workers.  For  example,  it  would  not  be  out  of  line  to 
regard  military  mutinies  as  among  the  largest  and  most  effective  strikes  in 
European  history  before  the  emergence  of  labour  militancy  associated  with 
the  Industrial  Revolution.  However,  generalizations  about  soldier-labour  in 
Europe  during  the  early  modern  period  -  taken  here  to  encompass  those 
decades  falling  roughly  between  1500  and  1790  -  have  to  be  advanced  cau- 
tiously and  hedged  around  with  caveats.  This  is  for  three  principal  reasons. 
First,  there  was  considerable  variety  of  practice  both  within  and  between 
polities  with  regard  to  the  employment  of  soldiers,  which  makes  generaliza- 
tion hazardous.  Secondly,  the  period  was  characterized  by  considerable 
changes  of  practice.  To  be  sure,  the  notion  that  these  changes  constituted  a 
"military  revolution",  at  least  in  the  format  originally  proposed  by  Michael 
Roberts  in  the  1950s  and  subsequently  amended  by  Geoffrey  Parker,  has 
been  challenged  and  rejected  by  many  specialists.  But  the  debate  over 
the  "military  revolution"  has  emphasized  the  extent  of  the  changes  that 
were  taking  place,  though  these  occurred  over  a  much  longer  timeframe 
than  Roberts  and  Parker  envisaged,  and  lay  as  much  in  the  areas  of  state 
development,  the  economy,  and  the  management  of  armies,  for  instance, 
as  in  the  realms  of  weaponry,  drill,  and  tactics.  This  chapter  will  seek  to  do 
justice  to  these  changes  in  the  space  available  without  misrepresenting  the 
reality  of  complex  and  uneven  developments.  Thirdly,  precisely  because  the 
exploration  of  soldier-labour  is  so  important  and  almost  unprecedented,  the 
effort  must  be  undertaken  with  care  so  as  to  avoid  distorting  categories  and 
conclusions  by  imprudently  constructing  generalizations  about  military 

1  I  wish  to  thankjoel  Felix  and  Beatrice  Heuser  for  their  comments  on  an  early  draft  of  this 
paper.  I  am  especially  grateful  to  John  Lynn  for  his  advice  and  permission  to  use  some  of  the 
ideas  and  material  from  his  "Comments  on  Mercenary  Military  Service  in  Early  Modern  Europe", 
paper  presented  at  the  IISH  Conference  in  March  2010. 


136 


FRANK  TALLETT 


labour  from  the  study  of  the  civilian  workforce  or  by  too  freely  imposing 
concepts  generated  by  modern  labour  studies  onto  an  earlier  era.  As  military 
institutions  and  practices  are  incorporated  within  a  broader  labour  history, 
it  is  important  to  respect  the  integrity  of  the  military  past.  These  points 
need  to  be  borne  in  mind  not  least  of  all  with  regard  to  the  many  and  varied 
forms  of  recruitment  that  were  to  be  found  in  the  early  modern  period. 

Methods  of  recruitment,  c.  1500-1650 

To  fill  the  ranks  of  their  armies,  early  modern  governments  made  use  of  a 
variety  of  methods  of  recruitment,  which  stood  on  a  spectrum  between  the 
involuntary  and  the  voluntary.  In  different  ways,  all  drafted  recruits  forcibly 
by  making  use  of  the  generally  accepted  -  if  vague  and  ill-defined  -  notion 
that  adult  male  subjects  had  some  responsibility  to  bear  arms  in  defence  of 
their  homeland.  Sweden,  with  its  tiny  population  (1.25  million  in  1620),  its 
need  to  raise  forces  to  defend  its  newly  won  independence  from  Denmark 
in  the  sixteenth  century,  and  its  desire  to  pursue  its  bellicose  ambitions  in 
the  following  century,  came  closest  to  constructing  a  system  of  universal 
conscription.  As  a  result  of  initiatives  launched  by  Gustavus  Vasa  (1523-1560) 
and  developed  by  Gustavus  Adolphus  (1611-1632),  lists  of  able-bodied  males 
aged  over  eighteen  years  were  drawn  up  annually  and  used  by  conscript 
commissioners  to  select  the  required  number  of  men.  Nobles,  clerics,  and 
some  peasants,  as  well  as  apprentices  in  the  royal  gardens  and  church 
organists,  were  exempt  from  the  draft.  Yet  the  system  was  remarkably 
wide-ranging.  Almost  50,000  men  were  conscripted  between  1626  and  1630, 
and  under  Charles  XII  (1697-1718)  levies  were  taken  more  than  once  per  year. 
Significantly,  the  conscripts  could  be  required  to  serve  outside  their  home- 
land.2 Other  states,  including  Habsburg  Spain  and  Brandenburg-Prussia, 
considered  the  use  of  conscription,  but  none  adopted  it  in  a  fully  fledged 
form  until  it  was  introduced  by  France  in  the  unprecedented  circumstances 
of  the  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic  wars. 

Sweden  went  furthest  in  employing  conscription,  but  many  other  poli- 
ties -including  towns  as  well  as  national  governments  -  made  use  of  the 
obligation  to  bear  arms  to  forcibly  recruit  men  into  militias.  True,  the  local 
nobility  in  Bavaria  and  Brandenburg  hesitated  at  the  thought  of  arming  their 


2  Glete,  War  and  the  State  in  Early  Modern  Europe,  pp.  179, 189-191, 194-195,  201-206;  Tallett, 
War  and  Society  in  Early-Modern  Europe,  pp.  82-83. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


137 


tenants,  but  elsewhere  nobles  and  rulers  had  no  such  compunctions.3  In 
England,  for  example,  the  militia  system  received  a  new  lease  of  life  under 
Henry  VIII.  All  those  with  £10  in  land  and  the  equivalent  in  goods  were 
obliged  to  keep  weapons  and  armour  and  be  ready  to  serve  the  king.  The 
enquiry  of  1552  revealed  the  existence  of  128,250  available  men,  though 
their  military  knowledge  and  ability  to  equip  themselves  was  patchy.4 
Venice  similarly  rostered  20,000  militia  to  defend  the  terraferma  in  1528 
and  a  number  of  German  states  and  towns  reorganized  their  militias  for 
local  defence  in  the  crisis  years  of  the  Reformation  and  the  Thirty  Years 
War.5  In  practice,  militias  proved  to  be  of  dubious  military  value.  Poorly 
equipped  and  lacking  training,  they  were  unable  to  confront  professional 
forces,  and  their  reluctance  to  serve  away  from  their  immediate  locality 
further  restricted  their  usefulness.  However,  as  we  shall  see,  after  c.  1650 
they  would  be  reconfigured  by  inventive  rulers  who  employed  militias  to 
bulk  out  their  regular  forces. 

Governments  also  forcibly  drafted  men  whom  they  regarded  as  harmful 
to  society  or  otherwise  useless.  This  was  not  a  novel  expedient:  up  to  12  per 
cent  of  men  serving  in  English  forces  between  1339  and  1361  may  have  been 
criminals.6  On  average,  the  English  crown  recruited  6,500  men  annually  for 
overseas  service  between  1585  and  1602,  many  of  them  ne'er-do-wells.7  The 
Tudor  administration  in  Ireland  was  especially  keen  to  encourage  social  and 
economic  stability  by  freeing  the  body  politic  of  undesirables.  It  periodically 
emptied  the  prisons  of  Ulster,  leaving  the  province  "in  more  complete  peace 
and  obedience  than  has  ever  been  seen  since  the  Conquest",  according  to 
one  seventeenth-century  English  administrator.8  Similarly,  the  republic  of 
Genoa  enlisted  Corsican  bandits,  although  it  did  promise  a  pardon  at  the 
end  of  their  service.9  However,  the  impressment  of  dissolute  persons  should 
not  be  exaggerated  and  probably  looms  larger  in  the  historiography  than 
is  warranted.10  Rogues,  vagabonds,  and  criminals  made  bad  soldiers,  and 
commanders  were  reluctant  to  have  too  many  in  their  forces.  Sir  Francis  de 

3  Schnitter,  Volkund Landesdefension,  pp.  123-130. 

4  Goring,  "The  Military  Obligations  of  the  English  People",  pp.  112-137,  "The  General  Proscrip- 
tion of  1552".  See  also  Fissel,  English  Warfare,  7577-7642,  pp.  61-66. 

5  Mallett  and  Hale,  The  Military  Organization  of  a  Renaissance  State,  p.  353;  Albert,  "Staat 
und  Gesellschaft,  1500-1745",  pp.  11,  591. 

6  Hewitt,  The  Organization  of  War  under  Edward  III,  pp.  29-30. 

7  Hammer,  Elizabeth's  Wars,  pp.  245-247. 

8  Quoted  in  O'Reilly,  "The  Irish  Mercenary  Tradition  in  the  1600s",  p.  390. 

9  Braudel,  The  Mediterranean  and  the  Mediterranean  World  in  the  Age  of  Philip  II,  II,  p.  749. 

10  See  the  exaggerated  comment  in  Motley,  A  History  of  the  United  Netherlands,  IV,  p.  69,  for 
example. 


138 


FRANK  TALLETT 


Vere  was  accordingly  "careful  to  send  them  back  again"  to  England  from  his 
command  in  the  Netherlands  when  he  discovered  their  origins.11  However, 
governments  in  the  eighteenth  century  would  make  increased  use  of  their 
power  to  draft  such  men  in  their  efforts  to  find  recruits  for  their  burgeoning 
armies. 

Standing  somewhere  between  voluntary  and  involuntary  forms  of 
recruitment  was  what  might  best  be  termed  the  quasi-feudal  system.  The 
socio-cultural  identity  of  the  nobility  remained  bound  up  with  military 
endeavour,  and  the  medieval  notion  that  nobles  had  a  feudal  obligation 
to  fight  for  their  ruler  retained  some  vigour.  Accordingly,  rulers  in  the 
sixteenth  century  still  resorted  to  the  customary  way  to  raise  troops  by 
calling  upon  their  nobles  to  turn  out  accompanied  by  their  retinues.  Thus 
the  ban  and  arriere  ban  were  deployed  in  France  with  a  degree  of  success, 
though  some  individuals  chose  to  make  a  financial  contribution  rather 
than  serve  in  person.12  Here,  the  great  nobility  retained  an  important  role 
in  the  provision  of  the  cavalry.13  In  England,  the  great  nobility  were  less 
important  than  in  previous  decades,  and  the  crown  relied  more  upon  the 
lesser  gentry,  though  members  of  the  court  nobility  still  had  an  important 
if  neglected  role.14  Nobles  assembled  their  retinues  in  various  ways:  they 
recruited  volunteers;  they  established  contracts  with  subordinate  officers  to 
find  men;  and  they  called  out  their  dependants,  affinities,  and  tenants  who 
had  little  choice  but  to  follow  their  lord.  For  instance,  the  Earl  of  Leicester, 
who  was  authorized  by  Elizabeth  I  to  raise  500  infantry  in  1585,  responded 
by  insisting  that  his  tenants,  whose  leases  obliged  them  to  serve  "in  tyme 
of  warre",  should  follow  him  into  the  field.15  Nobles  continued  to  obey  their 
ruler's  summons  to  arms  in  this  way  throughout  the  sixteenth  century, 
not  least  because  they  used  their  role  as  recruiting  agents  to  strengthen 
their  position  vis-a-vis  the  crown  but  also  over  their  own  dependants.16  The 
numbers  that  could  be  raised  in  this  way  were  not  insignificant.  The  Earl 
of  Pembroke  reportedly  brought  2,000  men  from  his  Welsh  estates  during 
the  Western  rebellion  of  1549  though,  as  this  example  suggests,  the  use  of 

11  Quoted  in  Trim,  "Fighting  'Jacob's  Wars'",  p.  232. 

12  Lot,  Recherches  sur  les  ejfectifs  des  armeesfrancaises,  pp.  258-261. 

13  Potter,  Renaissance  France  at  War,  pp.  177-179. 

14  Goring,  "The  Military  Obligations  of  the  English  People",  pp.  112-137;  Grummit,  "The  Court, 
War  and  Noble  Power  in  England". 

15  Adams,  "The  Gentry  of  North  Wales  and  the  Earl  of  Leicester's  Expedition  to  the  Nether- 
lands", pp.  133-134,  "Military  Obligations  of  Leasehold  Tenants  in  Lancastrian  Denbigh",  p.  206. 

16  Gunn,  Grummit,  and  Cool,  War,  State  and  Society  in  England  and  the  Netherlands,  pp.  51-60, 
138-142, 144-148;  Boynton,  The  Elizabethan  Militia,  pp.  76-88. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


139 


these  semi-feudal  retinues  was  generally  restricted  to  local  service  within 
the  homeland.17  But,  as  time  went  on,  a  declining  proportion  of  the  noble 
class  proved  willing  to  honour  their  "feudal"  obligations,  and  the  system  fell 
into  disuse.  Nobles  nevertheless  continued  to  associate  their  social  status, 
and  the  privileges  it  brought,  with  martial  virtues  and  military  service.  As 
we  shall  see,  in  the  eighteenth  century  rulers  played  upon  this  to  make  use 
of  them  as  recruiting  agents. 

It  was  generally  agreed  that  volunteers  made  better  soldiers  than  pressed 
men.  As  one  captain  observed,  "it  is  most  sure  [...]  that  persuading  without 
pressing  will  carry  most  and  make  the  best  soldiers".18  This  was  one  reason 
why  states  preferred  to  use  voluntary  methods  of  recruitment.  Three  main 
systems  for  voluntary  recruiting  can  be  identified,  though  they  shared  some 
important  characteristics.  The  first  involved  the  use  of  commissioned  offic- 
ers. Typically  a  captain  would  be  issued  by  a  ruler  with  letters  patent  that 
left  him  free  to  appoint  his  junior  and  non-commissioned  officers  (NCOs) 
and  that  designated  the  area  in  which  he  could  recruit.  He,  together  with  a 
small  party  that  included  veterans  whenever  possible  attracted  volunteers  by 
broadcasting  the  need  for  men  and  by  making  soldiering  appear  as  attractive 
as  possible  through  various  means  of  public  display  -  beating  a  drum,  unfurl- 
ing the  colours,  recounting  tales  of  heroic  military  action  -  as  well  as  through 
the  purchase  of  copious  amounts  of  alcohol  and  the  payment  of  a  bounty. 
Recruiting  by  commission  was  used  both  to  raise  new  companies  and  to 
maintain  existing  ones  at  something  approaching  full  strength,  and  was 
employed  throughout  western  Europe.  As  one  veteran  commentator  noted, 
"The  levying  of  souldiers  [...]  by  the  sound  of  the  drumme  [...]  is  generally 
used  over  the  most  partes  of  Christendome."19  It  reached  a  peak  of  efficiency 
in  sixteenth-century  Spain  where  the  monarchy  raised  an  average  of  9,000 
men  annually  with  up  to  20,000  being  recruited  in  some  years,  though  the 
strains  of  war  eventually  took  their  toll  and  Philip  II's  successors  reverted 
to  more  traditional  means,  handing  over  responsibility  for  recruitment  to 
local  towns  and  nobles  as  administration  gave  way  to  asiento.20 

The  second  method  of  voluntary  recruitment  involved  negotiating  an  agree- 
ment, the  Bestallung,  with  a  military  contractor  for  the  delivery  of  a  specified 
number  of  troops  at  an  agreed  time  and  place.  The  contract  also  set  out  the 

17  Dictionary  of  National  Biography,  63  vols  (London,  1885-1903),  IX,  pp.  671-672. 

18  Quoted  in  Trim,  "Fighting  'Jacob's  Wars'",  p.  229. 

19  F.  Markham,  Five  Decades  of  Epistles  ofWarre  (London,  1622),  p.  30,  quoted  in  Trim  "Fighting 
'Jacob's  Wars'",  p.  236. 

20  Thompson,  War  and  Government  in  Habsburg  Spain,  pp.  103-145. 


140 


FRANK  TALLETT 


terms  of  service,  including  levels  of  pay,  duration,  and  the  forms  of  warfare 
in  which  the  troops  could  be  involved.  Particularly  in  demand  were  German 
Landsknechte,  all-arms  units  noted  for  their  reliability  in  battle,  together  with 
specialist  forces  including  Swiss  pikemen,  German  Reiter  or  pistoleers,  and 
Albanian  and  Savoyard  light  cavalry.  Contract  troops  developed  a  reputation 
for  being  assertive  in  defence  of  their  rights,  refusing  to  fight  if  they  were  not 
paid,  for  instance,  and  they  were  not  cheap.  However,  they  comprised  a  high 
proportion  of  veterans,  came  ready  trained  and  equipped,  and  acquitted 
themselves  so  well  on  the  battlefield  that  few  states  dared  do  without  them. 

One  disadvantage  of  contract  troops  was  that  money  not  only  had  to  be 
found  "up  front"  to  employ  them,  but  a  continuing  revenue  stream  was  also 
essential  to  retain  their  services.  This  was  always  going  to  be  difficult  for 
cash-strapped  governments.  The  situation  was  just  about  workable  during 
the  sixteenth  century  when  wars  had  lasted  for  no  more  than  two  or  three 
campaign  seasons,  but  conflicts  began  to  increase  in  duration,  especially 
after  the  temporary  lull  provided  by  the  Peace  of  Cateau-Cambresis  (1559), 
putting  increased  strain  on  state  finances.  This  opened  up  the  potential  for 
a  novel  form  of  contracting  which,  following  Fritz  Redlich,  I  will  designate 
"general  contracting".21  The  general  contractor  differed  from  the  traditional 
mercenary  contractor  of  the  late  fifteenth  and  early  sixteenth  centuries  in 
that  he  did  not  merely  raise  a  troop  in  return  for  initial  costs.  Instead,  he 
met  these  initial  and  some  ongoing  costs  -  recruitment,  wages,  equipment, 
and  supplies  -  well  into  the  campaign,  eventually  recouping  his  outlay 
and  making  a  profit  by  the  receipt  of  tax  revenues,  lump  sum  payments, 
{Contributions  levied  on  friendly  and  enemy  territory,  and  booty.  The  unit 
was  "owned"  by  the  contractor  who  had  raised  it  and  thus  proprietorship 
as  well  as  entrepreneurship  became  significant  features  of  warfare  in  the 
late  sixteenth  and  first  half  of  the  seventeenth  centuries.22 

The  system  of  general  contracting  reached  a  peak  during  the  Thirty  Years 
War  (1618-1648).  Fought  largely  within  the  German  theatre,  but  involving 
almost  all  the  European  states,  the  conflict  demanded  unprecedented 
numbers  of  troops.  Rulers  lacked  the  necessary  native  manpower,  the 
administrative  structures,  and  the  liquid  cash  to  recruit  and  supply  the 
soldiers  themselves  and  turned  to  the  services  of  general  contractors,  who 
undertook  the  provision  of  whole  regiments  and  even  armies.  The  foremost 
employer  was  the  Holy  Roman  Emperor  who  had  large  potential  assets  in 
the  form  of  land  and  tax  revenues,  but  lacked  the  administrative  machinery 

21  Redlich,  The  German  Military  Enterpriser  and  His  Workforce,  remains  the  classic  study. 

22  Parrott,  "From  Military  Enterprise  to  Standing  Armies",  esp.  pp.  79-83. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


141 


in  his  Austrian  lands  to  mobilize  these.23  France  stood  out  against  the  trend, 
but  even  it  was  obliged  to  make  limited  use  of  general  contractors.24  The 
leading  enterpriser  was  Albrecht  von  Wallenstein.  His  army  lists  recorded 
total  paper  strengths  in  1625  of  61,900,  rising  to  150,900  five  years  later.25 
To  recruit  and  supply  forces  on  such  a  huge  scale  perforce  involved  the 
contractor  in  establishing  networks  with  subcontracting  colonels  and  cap- 
tains who  "beat  the  drum"  and  produced  the  volunteers.  Not  only  that,  but 
the  contractor  made  agreements  with  financiers  and  bankers,  merchants, 
munitionnaires,  arms  manufacturers,  and  others  to  supply  the  army  with 
food,  munitions,  equipment,  and  pay.  Accordingly,  regiments  or  armies  such 
as  those  raised  by  Ernst  von  Mansfeld,  Bernhard  of  Saxe-Weimar,  Albrecht 
von  Wallenstein,  Johan  Baner,  or  Lennart  Torstensson  represented  the  ac- 
cumulation of  venture  capital  on  a  huge  scale,  and  the  commander  presided 
over  a  group  of  stakeholders  who  all  expected  a  return  on  their  investment, 
whether  that  investment  be  financial  or  purely  military,  with  implications 
for  the  relationship  between  soldier  and  employer,  as  we  shall  see. 

Methods  of  recruitment,  c.  1650-1790 

From  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth  century,  methods  of  recruitment 
changed  in  a  number  of  significant  ways.  In  the  first  major  development, 
states  made  greater  use  of  involuntary  recruitment.  They  continued  to  draft 
criminals  and  ne'er-do-wells,  but  in  larger  numbers  than  before.  The  war 
minister  of  France,  the  Comte  de  St  Germain,  noted  in  1775  that,  "As  things 
are,  the  army  must  inevitably  consist  of  the  scum  of  the  people,  and  of  all 
those  for  whom  society  has  no  use."26  More  importantly,  states  developed  the 
obligation  to  perform  military  service  to  draft  men  into  militias.  These  could 
be  used  for  special  purposes,  such  as  policing  Huguenot  areas,  serving  as  a 
reserve  in  time  of  war,  or  providing  a  mechanism  for  drafting  men  directly 
into  the  regular  forces.  Of  the  great  powers,  it  was  France  under  Louis  XIV 
that  led  the  way.  Every  parish  was  obliged  to  provide  a  recruit  who  could 
be  taken  into  the  regular  army.  In  this  way  more  than  250,000  men  were 

23  He  employed  twice  as  many  contractors  as  Sweden:  Redlich,  The  German  Military  Enterpriser 
andHis  Workforce,  I,  p.  206. 

24  Parrott,  "French  Military  Organization  in  the  1630s",  pp.  160-163,  Richelieu's  Army. 

25  Kollmann,  DocumentaBohemicaBellum  Tricennale Illustrantia,  IV,  pp.  414-446.  There  were 
around  210,000  soldiers  employed  in  Germany  in  1648:  Parker,  The  Thirty  Years  War,  p.  191. 

26  Quoted  in  Ducros,  French  Society  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  p.  294.  On  Prussia,  see  Wilson, 
"Social  Militarization  in  Eighteenth-Century  Germany",  pp.  16-18. 


142 


FRANK  TALLETT 


raised  between  1701  and  1713,  representing  46  per  cent  of  the  native  recruits 
who  fought  during  the  War  of  the  Spanish  Succession,  while  some  120,000 
militia  were  drafted  to  replace  garrisoned  veterans  in  the  1740s.27  Although 
heartily  detested,  militia  service  was  supportable  because  the  wealthy  and 
well-connected  were  able  to  buy  themselves  out.  Many  German  states  made 
even  greater  use  of  the  militia.  In  Bavaria,  Mecklenburg,  and  Wiirttemberg 
under  the  regency  of  Friedrich  Karl  (1677-1693),  militia  formations  were 
raised  and  then  drafted  into  the  regular  army  as  the  need  arose.  Elsewhere, 
as  in  Saxony,  Mainz,  and  Wiirzburg,  the  intermediate  militia  stage  was 
omitted  and  men  on  the  militia  lists  were  taken  straight  into  the  army.  In 
Prussia  in  1733,  Hesse-Cassel  in  1762,  and  Austria  between  1771  and  1780,  a 
canton  system  of  recruitment  was  adopted  (Kantonverfassung),  with  each 
regiment  being  allocated  a  district  from  which  it  drew  regular  annual  levies, 
the  compulsory  element  of  service  being  supplied  by  the  obligation  that  had 
existed  to  enrol  in  the  militia.28 

The  second  major  development  concerned  the  system  of  military  con- 
tracting. This  did  not  end  altogether  after  1650,  but  it  changed  markedly.  The 
general  contractors  who  had  figured  so  prominently  in  the  Thirty  Years  War 
disappeared  from  the  scene,  and  military  contracting  in  its  classical  sense 
was  substantially  modified.  Military  contracting  had  always  represented  a 
standing  affront  to  princes'  sovereignty.  This  was  what  Stephen  Gardiner  had 
been  getting  at  in  1545  when  he  wrote  of  the  need  "to  eskape  the  thrawldom 
to  such  noughty  mennes  service".29  Moreover,  some  contractors  in  the  Thirty 
Years  War  had  displayed  signs  of  a  dangerous  autonomy.  Cardinal  Richelieu 
commented  about  Bernhard  of  Saxe-Weimar,  "An  excellent  commander 
but  so  much  for  himself  that  no-one  could  be  sure  of  him".30  Accordingly, 
the  use  of  general  contractors  was  phased  out  and  the  role  of  the  private 
entrepreneur  was  diminished.  For  a  while,  the  market  for  contract  troops 
was  left  to  the  younger  sons  of  German  princes  who  had  no  personal 
patrimony  or  hope  of  royal  succession.31  But  from  the  late  seventeenth 

27  Corvisier,  L'armeefrancaise  de  lafm  duXVIIe  siecle  au  ministere  de  Choiseul,  I,  tables  pp.  157, 
248;  Lynn,  Giant  of  the  Grand  Steele,  pp.  369-393.  See  also  Girard,  Le  service  mititaire  en  France 
a  lafm  du  regne  de  Louis  XIV. 

28  Summarized  in  Wilson,  War,  State  and  Society  in  Wiirttemberg,  pp.  79-81.  See  also  Ingrao, 
The  Hessian  Mercenary  State;  and  Duffy,  The  Army  of  Frederick  the  Great,  pp.  54-57. 

29  Muller,  The  Letters  of  Stephen  Gardiner,  p.  180. 

30  Quoted  in  Wedgwood,  The  Thirty  Years  War,  p.  366.  But  see  the  revisionary  comments  of 
Parrott  on  Wallenstein:  "From  Military  Enterprise  to  Standing  Armies",  p.  85.  The  traditional 
view  of  his  treachery  is  given  in  "Wallenstein",  in  G.  Martel  (ed.),  Encyclopedia  of  War,  5  vols 
(Chichester,  2012),  V,  pp.  2350-2352. 

31  Barker,  "Military  Entrepreneurship  and  Absolutism". 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


143 


century  and  throughout  the  eighteenth,  a  substantial  number  of  rulers 
began  to  rent  out  their  armies  to  foreign  employers.  The  states  concerned 
in  this  "soldier-trade"  were  principally  German  but  included  others  such  as 
Savoy-Piedmont  and  Sweden  under  the  regency  of  Karl  XI.  In  return  for  the 
hire  of  its  forces,  Sweden  took  "subsidies"  from  France  using  the  money  to 
retain  a  credible  army  in  Pomerania.32  The  eighteenth-century  market  for 
the  hire  of  soldiers  was  dominated  by  states  from  within  the  Holy  Roman 
Empire,  including  Hesse-Cassel,  Hanover,  Wiirttemberg,  Bavaria,  Saxony, 
the  Palatinate,  and  Wiirzburg.33  Significantly,  many  of  the  troops  who  were 
hired  out  had  been  forcibly  drafted  into  the  army  with  implications  for 
scholars  seeking  to  construct  a  taxonomy  of  army  types,  as  we  shall  see. 

As  well  as  relying  on  impressed  men,  militias,  and  hired  forces,  states 
also  developed  their  systems  for  finding  volunteers.  Even  in  Prussia,  which 
relied  heavily  upon  impressment,  more  than  half  the  army  continued  to 
be  volunteers.34  How  were  these  found?  As  noted  above,  the  quasi-feudal 
system  of  recruitment  was  already  in  terminal  decline  in  the  sixteenth 
century.  Nobles  nevertheless  continued  to  associate  their  social  status  with 
martial  virtues  and  military  service,  and  rulers  made  use  of  this  to  engage 
their  social  and  political  elites  in  the  recruitment  and  maintenance  of  their 
forces.35  Many  nobles  were  prepared  to  put  themselves  and  their  private 
fortunes  at  the  disposal  of  monarchs  in  the  expectation  of  gaining  prestige 
and  because,  quite  simply,  this  was  what  was  expected  of  them.  One  way 
of  encouraging  nobles  to  do  so  was  by  formally  implementing  a  system  of 
venality  under  which  officers  purchased  their  commissions,  as  happened 
most  notably  in  France.36  Although  venality  theoretically  gave  officers 
ownership  of  their  office  and  not  of  their  men,  in  practice  they  were  still 
expected  to  recruit  their  unit.  They  did  so  by  public  appeal  to  volunteers, 
by  using  their  influence  over  dependants,  and  by  deploying  their  private 
retinues  in  those  instances  where  they  still  maintained  them.  Equally, 

32  Storrs,  War,  Diplomacy  and  the  Rise  of Savoy,  ch.  2;  Upton,  Charles  XI  and  Swedish  Absolutism, 
pp.  14-15,  94-97- 

33  On  the  soldier-trade,  see  Hartmann,  Geld  als  Instrument  Europaischer  Machtpolitik,  Karl 
Albrecht-Karl  VII,  pp.  150-160;  Wilson,  War,  State  and  Society  in  Wiirttemberg,  ch.  3;  Ingrao,  The 
Hessian  Mercenary  State;  Atwood,  The  Hessians;  Brauer,  Die  Hannoversch-Englischen  Subsidi- 
envertrage, 

34  Wilson,  "Social  Militarization  in  Eighteenth-Century  Germany",  p.  5. 

35  Parrott,  "From  Military  Enterprise  to  Standing  Armies";  Glete,  War  and  the  State  in  Early 
Modern  Europe,  pp.  52-66. 

36  Rowlands,  The  Dynastic  State  and  the  Army  under  louis  XIV,  "Louis  XIV,  Aristocratic  Power 
and  the  Elite  Units  of  the  French  Army".  On  problems  with  venality  in  the  later  eighteenth 
century,  see  Felix  and  Tallett,  "The  French  Experience,  1661-1815",  pp.  158-159. 


144 


FRANK  TALLETT 


nobles  were  expected  to  use  their  own  resources  to  equip,  pay,  and  feed 
their  men  when  state  funding  ran  out,  as  it  invariably  did.  Venality  gave 
officers  an  incentive  to  invest  their  personal  resources  in  the  recruitment 
and  maintenance  of  their  units,  since  they  would  be  more  likely  to  get  a 
return  on  their  investment  over  the  longer  term.  Profits  could  be  made,  for 
example,  by  selling  rights  of  leave,  from  the  supply  of  food  and  equipment  to 
the  men,  and  from  the  sale  of  subordinate  officerships  and  NCO  positions. 
Even  where  venality  was  not  introduced,  nobles  could  still  be  lured  into 
accepting  a  commission  and  acting  as  a  recruiting  agent  by  the  expectation 
of  making  a  profit  through  the  Kompaniewirtschaft,  the  system  whereby 
captains  made  money  from  administering  the  finances  of  a  company  of 
soldiers.  Austrian  colonels  expected  to  earn  10,000  gulden  annually.37  Prus- 
sia resisted  the  trend,  though  here  the  lack  of  alternative  employment  forced 
nobles  into  the  army.  Proprietorship  and  entrepreneurship  thus  continued 
to  be  important  within  armies  throughout  the  early  modern  period,  and 
integral  to  the  process  of  raising  and  maintaining  forces. 

Looking  at  the  period  1500-1790  overall,  three  points  stand  out.  First, 
governments  used  a  variety  of  systems  to  recruit  their  forces.  These  systems 
reflected  the  nature  of  the  early  modern  state,  and  in  particular  the  relative 
fiscal  and  administrative  weakness  of  central  authority.  This  obliged  gov- 
ernments to  rely  upon  the  use  of  contractors,  including  general  contractors 
for  a  time,  as  well  as  upon  their  social  and  political  elites  to  recruit  and 
maintain  armies.  Even  when  the  use  of  general  contractors  was  phased 
out  after  c.  1650,  states  still  found  it  easier  to  hire  troops  rather  than  raise 
them  ab  initio,  and  the  dependence  of  rulers  upon  the  co-operation  of  their 
nobilities,  who  served  as  intermediate  agents  of  government,  remained 
very  considerable. 

Secondly,  despite  the  increased  use  of  impressment,  volunteers  consti- 
tuted the  majority  of  recruits  before  the  French  revolutionary  wars  when, 
confronted  with  an  apparently  overwhelming  coalition  of  European  states, 
the  nascent  republic  introduced  the  levee  en  masse  in  1793  and  further 
refined  its  procedures  for  conscription  through  the  Jourdan-Delbrel  law 
of  1799.  The  readiness  of  men  to  volunteer  for  military  service  can  be 
chiefly  explained  by  the  overcrowded  state  of  the  labour  market.  For  most 
volunteers,  the  army  was  an  employer  of  last  resort,  and  they  signed  on 
only  because  there  was  nothing  better  to  be  had.  To  be  sure,  a  few  may  have 
joined  to  throw  off  the  humdrum  workaday  world  of  civilian  employment. 
"To  bee  bound  an  apprentice,  that  life  I  deemed  little  better  than  a  dog's 

37   Asch,  "War  and  State-Building",  p.  326;  McKay,  Prince  Eugene  of  Savoy,  p.  11. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


145 


life  and  base",  wrote  Sydnam  Poyntz  in  explanation  of  his  decision  to  join 
up.38  Others  welcomed  the  chance  to  see  the  world,  or  the  opportunity 
to  enjoy  the  unrestrained  licentious  behaviour  that  characterized  what 
Erasmus  termed  "the  wicked  life  of  the  soldier",39  while  for  yet  others  the 
army  offered  the  chance  of  glory.  Francis  I,  the  Holy  Roman  Emperor  (1745- 
1765),  noted  that  "what  the  natives  of  Ireland  even  dislike  for  principle,  they 
generally  will  perform  through  a  desire  for  glory".40  Yet  most  recruits  agreed 
to  serve  for  the  prosaic  reason  that  they  simply  had  no  other  way  to  make 
a  living.  Hardship  and  need  were  the  best  recruiting  sergeants  and  drove 
men  into  armies.  Even  Poyntz  confessed  his  true  reason  for  enlisting:  "My 
necessitie  forced  mee,  my  Money  being  growne  short,  to  take  the  manes 
of  a  private  soldier."41  The  impoverished  recruit  created  by  the  playwright 
Calderon  de  la  Barca  summed  up  the  situation  for  the  overwhelming  major- 
ity of  volunteers:  "Only  great  need  drives  me  to  the  war,  I'd  never  go  had 
I  money  in  store."42  Recruitment  patterns  were  accordingly  closely  linked 
to  economic  cycles.  Volunteers  were  easiest  to  find  in  the  autumn  months 
as  agricultural  labourers  were  laid  off,  or  in  the  wake  of  a  slump.  Edward 
Coss  has  demonstrated  that  enlistment  in  the  British  army  soared  at  times 
of  economic  downturn.43  Of  course,  one  might  question  whether  potential 
recruits  faced  with  a  choice  between  starvation  and  signing-on  were  in  any 
meaningful  sense  "volunteers".  But  the  fact  that  they  were  theoretically  free 
agents,  and  there  was  no  legal  compulsion  on  them  to  join,  means  that  we 
should  locate  them  on  the  "free"  end  of  the  axis  of  our  graph. 

Thirdly,  the  ready  supply  of  volunteers  meant  that  governments  through- 
out our  period  could  use  impressment  and  militia  service  as  a  last  resort 
to  top  up  their  forces,  drawing  upon  those  elements  judged  to  be  of  little 
use  to  society  and  who  had  no  political  clout.  There  was  greater  resort  to 
involuntary  recruitment  in  the  later  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries. 
This  was  brought  about  by  an  expansion  in  the  number  of  men  under  arms. 
Historically,  around  1  per  cent  of  the  population  has  represented  the  ceiling 
for  sustainable  recruitment,  but  this  figure  began  to  be  routinely  exceeded 
with  Louis  XIV's  France  leading  the  way.  Peacetime  levels  of  about  10,000 
and  60,000-80,000  for  major  wars  before  1650  soared  to  totals  of  130,000 

38  Goodrick,  The  Relation  of  Sydnam  Poyntz,  p.  45. 

39  Quoted  in  Hale,  War  and  Society  in  Renaissance  Europe,  p.  127. 

40  Quoted  in  McGinn,  "St  Patrick's  Day  in  Vienna,  1766",  Irish  Roots  Magazine,  1  (1996),  pp.  10-11, 
cited  in  O'Reilly,  "The  Irish  Mercenary  Tradition  in  the  1600s",  p.  384. 

41  Goodrick,  The  Relation  of  Sydnam  Poyntz,  p.  45. 

42  Quoted  in  Stradling,  Europe  and  the  Decline  of  Spain,  p.  124. 

43  Coss,  All  for  the  King 's  Shilling. 


146 


FRANK  TALLETT 


and  360,000  respectively  by  the  1690s,  representing  over  2  per  cent  of  the 
French  population.  Prussia  during  the  Seven  Years  War  (1756-1763)  had 
250,000  men  under  arms,  around  5  per  cent  of  the  population  of  5  million, 
and  kept  an  army  of  150,000  in  peacetime.  Britain  similarly  came  close  to 
the  2  per  cent  mark  during  the  Seven  Years  War  and  War  of  American  In- 
dependence.44 These  wartime  highs  proved  unsustainable  in  the  long  term, 
but  they  nonetheless  represented  an  increase  on  earlier  decades,  and  by  the 
eighteenth  century  most  European  states  had  wartime  military  establish- 
ments that  were  four  or  five  times  bigger  than  those  of  their  predecessors 
200  years  previously.45  One  consequence  of  the  increased  number  of  men 
under  arms  was  the  need  to  make  greater  use  of  involuntary  methods  of 
recruitment.  These  methods  were  deployed  especially  by  those  states,  such 
as  Prussia,  that  maintained  disproportionately  large  armies  in  relation  to 
their  population,  and  whose  limited  tax  base  and  under-commercialized 
economies  made  it  difficult  to  mobilize  liquid  resources.46 

The  rewards  of  soldiering 

Whatever  the  process  that  led  to  their  recruitment,  all  soldiers  expected 
to  be  compensated  for  what  they  did.  This  included  receipt  of  pay,  and  in 
certain  respects  being  paid  made  them  similar  to  civilian  wage-labourers. 
Pay  rates  for  the  "average"  soldier  -  if  such  a  thing  existed  -  were  on  the  low 
side  but  broadly  consistent  with  those  in  the  civilian  labour  market.  The  1514 
Statute  of  Artificers  in  England  set  the  wages  of  skilled  craftsmen  at  6d  per 
day,  with  other  labourers  at  4d.  By  comparison  an  ordinary  infantryman 
received  some  6d  in  mid-century.  When  inflation  is  taken  into  account 
this  was  hardly  generous  but  not  out  of  line  with  what  one  might  expect.47 
Moreover,  soldiers  with  specialist  skills  who  were  in  short  supply  received 
additional  rewards,  so  that  manifold  gradations  of  pay  existed  in  early 
modern  armies.  Thus  the  company  assembled  by  Count  Brissac  for  royal 
service  in  1567  included  three  commissioned  officers,  two  NCOs,  a  quar- 

44  Gat,  "What  Constituted  the  Military  Revolution  of  the  Early  Modern  Period?",  pp.  36-38; 
Lynn,  "Revisiting  the  Great  Fact  of  War  and  Bourbon  Absolutism";  Frost,  The  Northern  Wars, 
p.  115. 

45  Wilson,  "Warfare  in  the  Old  Regime",  table  3:1,  p.  80. 

46  Wilson,  "Social  Militarization  in  Eighteenth  Century  Germany",  pp.  38-39;  Scott,  "The 
Fiscal-Military  State  and  International  Rivalry  during  the  Long  Eighteenth  Century",  pp.  47-48. 

47  Statutes  of  the  Realm,  11  vols  (London,  1810-1828),  III,  pp.  124-126;  Tallett,  War  and  Society  in 
Early-Modern  Europe,  pp.  94-95. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


147 


termaster,  musicians,  three  kinds  of  pikemen,  halberdiers,  and  three  sorts 
of  arquebusiers,  all  of  whom  received  different  levels  of  pay  with  the  result 
that  in  this  small  unit  there  were  fourteen  distinct  pay  grades.48  Specialist 
troops  received  higher  rewards  than  their  locally  recruited  counterparts, 
partly  in  recognition  of  their  superior  fighting  skills.  Landsknecht  pay  in 
sixteenth-century  French  royal  armies  was  about  20  per  cent  higher  than 
that  of  the  native  infantry,  and  the  German  units  also  received  additional 
bonus  payments.  Swiss  pikemen  in  French  employ  received  an  extra  month's 
wages  in  the  event  of  battle,  and  survivors  insisted  upon  receiving  the  pay 
of  casualties.49 

To  be  sure,  higher  pay  rates  did  not  simply  reflect  the  state  of  the  labour 
market  and  the  specialist  skills  on  offer.  Thus,  the  heavy  cavalry  through- 
out our  period  tended  to  be  especially  well  rewarded.  During  the  Wars 
of  Religion,  their  officers  were  paid  twice  as  much  as  analogous  ranks 
in  the  infantry;  and  even  the  lowest-paid  mounted  archer,  at  17  Livres  per 
month,  had  a  salary  higher  than  most  rank-and-file  infantry.  This  certainly 
reflected  their  perceived  usefulness  on  the  battlefield,  but  higher  wages 
were  also  meant  to  cover  the  initial  investment  in  horses  and  equipment 
that  was  required  of  the  mounted  soldier.  The  cost  of  outfitting  a  mounted 
archer  was  in  the  region  of  400  Livres;  and  a  minimum  of  600-700  Livres  was 
required  for  an  homme  d'armes  who  needed  three  horses  and  a  significantly 
greater  amount  of  armour.  This  was  ten  or  fifteen  times  the  cost  of  equip- 
ping a  heavily  armoured  pikeman.  Higher  wages  were  also  paid  to  cover  the 
cost  of  feeding  and  replacing  the  horses  while  on  campaign  (given  their  high 
mortality  levels,  the  latter  represented  a  significant  expense).50  Finally,  and 
most  importantly,  higher  pay  rates  in  the  cavalry  were  due  in  large  measure 
to  the  superior  social  status  of  the  members  of  this  branch  of  the  army. 

It  was  probably  in  the  artillery  regiments  -  units  that  proved  least 
attractive  to  the  nobility  and  where  there  were  the  clearest  functional 
divisions  -  that  the  laws  of  the  labour  market  can  be  seen  to  have  operated 

48  Wood,  The  King's  Army,  pp.  88-89. 

49  Potter,  Renaissance  France  at  War,  pp.  129-130, 137.  Being  hired  by  the  regiment  made  contract 
troops  more  expensive,  since  the  employer  had  to  fund  an  extra  layer  of  regimental  officers: 
Wood,  The  King's  Army,  p.  137. 

50  Wood,  The  King's  Army,  pp.  135-136;  Robinson,  "Horse  Supply  and  the  Development  of  the 
New  Model  Army",  p.  122  and  passim.  It  cost  around  £12  to  mount  and  equip  a  cavalryman 
in  England  in  the  1640s,  compared  to  an  infantryman's  pay  of  8d  per  day.  See  British  Library, 
Thomason  Tracts,  £300(5)  Ordinance...for  the  Raising  of  Five  Hundred  Horse;  Asquith,  The  New 
Model  Army,  p.  19.  Note  the  comments  of  Maurice  de  Saxe,  Mes  reveries  (1732),  in  Phillips,  Roots 
of  Strategy,  pp.  119-120, 137. 


148 


FRANK  TALLETT 


in  their  purest  form.  A  French  memoir  from  1568  estimated  that  2,620  people 
would  be  needed  to  service  the  artillery  train  of  the  royal  army,  including 
clerks,  gunners,  pioneers,  pontoon  specialists,  tenters,  drivers,  and  others. 
The  highest  paid  was  the  grand  master,  at  500  Livres  per  month;  the  lowest 
were  the  humble  labourers  or  pioneers.  As  James  Wood  has  indicated,  the 
wages  paid  to  the  personnel  of  the  artillery  train,  and  the  functions  they 
performed,  correlated  very  closely  to  an  industrial  enterprise.  Thus  there 
was  a  clear  labour  hierarchy,  with  those  exercising  managerial/supervisory 
roles  receiving  the  most  pay,  followed  by  the  skilled  elements  (roughly  22 
per  cent  of  the  total  force),  then  the  unskilled  workers  who  comprised  some 
75  per  cent  of  the  workforce.  All  the  skilled  workers,  beginning  with  the 
gunners  at  10  Livres  per  month,  received  higher  wage  rates  than  the  average 
pikeman  or  arquebusiers  at  8-9  Livres  per  month,  and  their  pay  compared 
favourably  with  that  of  the  mounted  archers  who,  when  expenses  were 
taken  into  account,  may  have  cleared  only  8.7  Livres  in  monthly  salary.51 

Like  their  counterparts  in  civilian  society,  soldiers  were  not  averse  to  us- 
ing their  "industrial  muscle"  to  wring  higher  rewards  out  of  their  employers. 
This  was  especially  the  case  with  groups  such  as  the  Swiss  pikemen  and 
the  Landsknechte,  both  of  whom  had  a  strong  sense  of  communal  solidarity 
reinforced  by  well-developed,  autonomous  internal  structures  that  made 
them,  in  some  respects,  akin  to  guilds  or  trade  unions.  The  Landsknechte, 
for  instance,  formed  self-governing  units  in  which  the  common  soldiers, 
comprising  the  gemeente  or  community,  elected  their  own  officers  (the 
voerder,  gemeene  weyfel,  and fourier),  administered  justice,  and  agreed  their 
terms  and  conditions  of  employment.52  They  used  their  corporate  solidarity 
to  drive  up  pay  rates  and  to  impose  what  now  might  be  termed  restrictive 
practices.  Thus  the  Swiss  in  1522  informed  their  immediate  employer,  the 
due  de  Montmorency,  that  they  would  not  assault  fortified  towns  because 
this  was  simply  "not  their  trade".53  Just  as  the  autonomy  and  restrictive 
practices  of  the  guilds  offended  the  Lumieres  of  later  Enlightenment  dec- 
ades, so  these  same  characteristics  of  the  Landsknechte  offended  their 
employers  even  though  their  military  skills  made  them  indispensable.  In 
the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  the  remedy  in  both  instances 
appeared  similar:  to  reduce  the  autonomy  and  self-governance  of  guilds  and 
Landsknechte.  In  the  case  of  the  former  this  meant  exposing  them  to  the 

51  Wood,  The  King's  Army,  pp.  161-168. 

52  Baumann,  Landsknechte;  Burschel,  Soldner in Nordwestdeutschland des  76.  undij.Jahrhun- 
derts. 

53  Du  Bellay  and  du  Bellay,  Memoires,  IV,  p.  189. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


149 


rigour  of  the  free  market,  and  in  the  case  of  the  latter  it  involved  an  attack 
on  their  internal  structures  of  governance. 

There  are  undoubtedly  parallels  to  be  drawn  between  soldiers  and  wage- 
labourers  in  civilian  society.  Yet  we  should  not  take  these  too  far.  One 
difference  was  the  irregularity  of  soldiers'  pay.  To  be  sure,  wage-labourers 
in  civilian  society  were  commonly  laid  off:  as  the  need  for  farm  labour  was 
reduced  in  the  winter  months  or  as  cyclical  slumps  hit  manufacturing  in- 
dustries. Soldiers  too  were  frequently  dismissed  at  the  end  of  the  campaign 
season  as  the  winter  months  approached.  What  was  distinctive  about  the 
soldier's  situation  was  the  extent  to  which  he  frequently  received  little  or 
no  pay  even  while  he  was  employed.  This  resulted  in  the  accumulation  of 
arrears  which  could  be  substantial.  By  February  1568  a  third  of  the  heavy 
cavalry  companies  in  the  French  royal  army  had  received  no  pay  since  the 
first  quarter  of  the  previous  year;  and  the  wages  of  the  rest  of  the  army  were 
more  than  six  months  in  arrears.  During  the  campaign  around  Landrecies 
in  1542,  the  English  commander  Wallop,  then  in  imperial  service,  reported 
of  his  men  that  they  were  "veray  poore  and  few  or  none  of  theym  have 
any  greate  store  of  money,  victualz  be  dere,  clothes  wax  thyn,  and  cold 
weather  encreseath".  Similarly,  the  veteran  Sir  James  Turner,  who  fought 
in  Ireland  for  a  Scots  contingent  during  the  Wars  of  the  Three  Kingdoms 
(as  the  English  Civil  Wars  are  now  more  adequately  referred  to)  recorded 
that  the  army  "fingered  no  pay  the  whole  time  I  stayd  in  Ireland,  except 
for  three  months".54 

One  response  of  soldiers  to  low  or  no  pay  was  to  mutiny,  and  in  some 
respects  this  withdrawal  of  labour  may  be  regarded  as  the  equivalent  of 
the  strike  in  the  civilian  labour  market.  Mutinies  were  most  common  and 
sophisticated  in  the  Spanish  Army  of  Flanders,  though  they  were  by  no 
means  restricted  to  these  forces.  Forty-five  major  munities  were  staged  (and 
there  was  a  good  deal  of  ritualized  drama  in  their  conduct)  between  1572 
and  1607,  with  some  lasting  more  than  a  year.  Mutineers  elected  leaders  or 
"management  committees",  negotiated  with  the  government,  and  sustained 
themselves  by  levying  local  taxes.55  However,  a  second  response  of  soldiers 
to  low  or  no  pay  was  unique  and  simply  not  available  to  civilian  workers. 
Without  the  wages  that  were  supposed  to  buy  essential  supplies,  the  soldiers 

54  Wood,  The  King's  Army,  p.  275;  Brewer,  Gairdner,  and  Brodie,  Letters  and  Papers,  Foreign 
and  Domestic,  of  the  Reign  of  Henry  VIII,  XVIII,  ii,  p.  267;  Turner,  Memoirs  of  His  Own  Life  and 
Times,  p.  24. 

55  Parker,  The  Army  of  Flanders  and  the  Spanish  Road,  pp.  185-206,  "Mutiny  and  Discontent  in 
the  Spanish  Army  of  Flanders";  Wymans,  "Les  mutineries  militaires  de  1596  a  1606". 


150 


FRANK  TALLETT 


resorted  to  pillaging  the  local  population,  taking  whatever  they  needed 
by  force.  Thus,  Thomas  Stockdale  complained  of  the  atrocities  commit- 
ted by  soldiers  based  in  Yorkshire  during  the  1640s,  admitting  that  if  only 
the  troops  had  been  paid  "the  sufferance  and  wrong  would  be  unto  many 
less  sensible".56  This  easy,  almost  casual  resort  to  violence,  often  involving 
extreme  levels  of  brutality,  can  be  explained  in  a  number  of  ways.  Robert 
Muchembled  notes  the  constant  and  systematic  pattern  of  conflict  between 
troops  and  members  of  the  rural  community.57  Such  poor  relations  in  part 
reflected  the  long-standing  urban/rural  hostility  that  was  a  pronounced 
feature  of  early  modern  society;  and  troops  recruited  largely  from  the  towns 
had  little  regard  for  inhabitants  of  the  countryside  whom  they  regarded  as 
backward,  stupid,  and  easy  prey.58 

However,  we  should  probably  look  beyond  town/country  relations  to 
the  huge  cultural  gulf  that  separated  soldiers  from  all  civilians.  As  Wood 
notes,  "The  soldiery  were  an  instrument  of  barely  controlled  violence  and 
destructiveness  and  their  vocation  and  values  were  based  upon  completely 
different  assumptions  about  rules  of  law,  property  rights,  and  the  appli- 
cation of  force  and  coercion  that  in  any  other  context  would  be  clearly 
criminal  behaviour."59  Levels  of  violence  were  especially  high  whenever 
there  was  a  heightened  sense  of  the  "Other"  between  soldiers  and  civilians 
brought  about,  for  example,  by  pronounced  ethnic,  religious,  or  cultural 
differences.60  Foreign  troops  in  particular  saw  themselves  as  set  apart  from 
the  native  civilian  population.  The  notorious  "Day  of  the  Landsknechte"  at 
Caen  in  1513  when  soldiers  ransacked  the  town  after  having  not  been  paid 
for  months,  the  sack  of  Rome  by  Charles  V's  unpaid  German  troops  in  1527, 
and  the  "Spanish  Fury"  at  Antwerp  in  1576  were  merely  the  best  known  of 
a  long  catalogue  of  outrages  by  non-native  troops.61  Similarly,  the  appalling 
treatment  of  Irish  civilians  in  the  1640s  by  English  soldiers  was  grounded 
in  the  widely  held  belief  that  Irish  Catholics  were  "backward"  with  respect 
to  religion  and  culture.  Barnaby  Rich  described  them  as  "more  uncivil, 
more  uncleanly,  more  barbarous  and  more  brutish  in  their  customs  and 
demeanours  than  any  other  people  in  the  known  world".62  Moreover,  it 

56  Johnson,  The  Fairfax  Correspondence,  I,  p.  203. 

57  Muchembled,  La  violence  au  village,  esp.  pp.  107-118. 

58  Hale,  War  and  Society  in  Renaissance  Europe,  pp.  190-191. 

59  Wood,  The  King's  Army,  p.  236. 

60  Hale,  "On  the  Concept  of  the  'Other'  and  the  'Enemy'". 

61  De  Bourdeille  de  Brantome,  Oeuvres  completes,  VI,  pp.  220-227;  Tracy,  Emperor  Charles  V, 
Impresario  of  War,  pp.  32-36;  Parker,  The  Dutch  Revolt,  p.  178. 

62  Rich,  A  Short  Survey  of  Ireland,  p.  2. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


151 


made  little  difference  when  soldiers  were  meant  to  be  allies  of  the  civilian 
population.  This  can  be  exemplified  by  the  behaviour  of  poorly  paid  Scots 
forces  in  England  during  the  first  Civil  War,  who  committed  numerous 
atrocities  in  their  search  for  supplies,  even  though  they  were  meant  to  be 
billeted  upon  a  friendly  population.63 

The  irregularity  of  their  pay  and  their  ready  resort  to  violence  when 
unpaid  were  not  the  only  things  that  distinguished  soldiers  from  civilian 
wage-labourers.  Being  paid  a  wage  was  not  necessarily  the  main  or  even  sole 
reason  for  fighting.  All  soldiers  anticipated  an  economic  reward,  but  this 
might  equally  come  from  ransom  or  from  booty  as  from  pay,  certainly  before 
c.  1650.  "Do  you  think  we  are  in  the  King's  service  for  the  four  ducats  a  month 
we  earn?",  Henry  VIII's  Spanish  captains  serving  at  Boulogne  rhetorically 
asked  their  general.  "Not  so  my  lord:  on  the  contrary,  we  serve  with  the 
hope  of  taking  prisoners  and  getting  their  ransom."64  Others  expected  to 
make  a  profit  by  picking  over  the  dead  and  wounded  on  the  battlefield 
and  from  the  sack  of  a  town  after  it  had  been  taken  by  assault.  The  laws 
of  war  permitted  the  soldiers  three  days  of  unrestricted  plunder  of  a  town 
that  had  been  stormed  after  it  had  unreasonably  refused  to  surrender. 
This  was  justified  partly  on  the  grounds  that  it  would  otherwise  have  been 
impossible  to  bring  the  soldiers  to  the  point  where  they  were  prepared  to 
undertake  the  hazardous  operation  of  storming  a  breach.  Outside  these 
instances,  monetary  reward  might  come  through  routine  pillaging  of 
peasants  and  others.  Thus  a  sixteenth-century  woodcut  by  Erhard  Schon 
shows  a  Landsknecht  and  his  female  companion  with  poems  accompanying 
the  two  characters.  The  Landsknecht,  a  former  cobbler,  explains  that  he 
will  abandon  shoemaking  for  soldiering  to  gain  what  he  can,  since  being  a 
cobbler  rewards  him  little,  though  "in  many  wars  I  have  won/Great  wealth 
and  manifold  honors/Who  then  knows  whom  fortune  favors?"  She  replies 
that,  "Perhaps  so  much  maybe  my  winning  [from  pillage] /Much  more  than 
ever  I  could  whilst  spinning."65  We  should  not  be  surprised  by  soldiers' 
expectation  of  reward  by  means  of  ransom  and  pillage,  for  the  spoils  of 
war  figured  prominently  as  a  form  of  legitimate  compensation  in  the  late 
Middle  Ages,  and  a  long  tradition  of  legal  plunder  preceded  early  modern 


63  British  Library,  Thomason  Tracts,  £365(9),  A  Remonstrance  Concerning  the  Misdemeanours 
of  some  of  the  Scots  Souldiers  in  the  County  ofYorke,  1646.  On  patterns  of  soldier/civilian  violence, 
see  Tallett,  "Soldats  et  actes  de  violence  a  l'encontre  des  civils  dans  les  lies  britanniques". 

64  Hume,  Chronicle  of  King  Henry  VIII...Written  in  Spanish  by  an  unknown  hand. 

65  Lynn,  Women,  Armies,  and  Warfare  in  Early  Modern  Europe,  pp.  16-17. 


152 


FRANK  TALLETT 


military  practice.  The  taking  of  spoils  was  a  defining  characteristic  of  just, 
or  public,  war.66 

Cash-strapped  governments,  unable  to  pay  the  soldiers  in  full  or  some- 
times at  all,  had  little  choice  but  to  accept  the  routine  nature  of  pillage.  The 
Mercure frangois  put  it  bluntly:  "One  finds  enough  soldiers  when  one  gives 
them  the  freedom  to  live  off  the  land,  and  allowing  them  to  pillage  supports 
them  without  pay."67  Indeed,  sometimes  the  situation  could  be  turned  to 
one's  advantage.  The  system  of  regulated  plunder  that  came  to  a  peak  in 
the  Thirty  Years  War  sought,  not  altogether  successfully,  to  allow  armies 
to  live  off  the  population  by  taking  regular  Kontributions.  Although  heavy, 
Kontributions  were  meant  to  preserve  the  productive  capacity  of  the  terri- 
tory while  tapping  it  for  the  army's  benefit.68  At  other  times,  giving  soldiers 
free  rein  to  pillage  was  a  deliberate  act  of  strategy,  designed  to  hamper 
the  movements  of  the  enemy  forces  and  bring  about  their  disintegration. 
Integral  to  pillaging  before  c.  1650  was  the  presence  with  the  army  of  non- 
combatants,  including  women,  who  foraged,  plundered,  managed  the  "take", 
and  exchanged  goods  for  money  or  food  with  the  sutlers  and  "fences".  The 
significance  of  all  this  from  our  point  of  view  is  that  soldiers  were  not  so 
much  being  paid  to  fight  but  rather  being  given  "a  de facto  licence  to  pillage 
in  order  to  support  themselves,  often  with  the  aid  of  their  comrades  and 
female  partners",  and  in  these  circumstances  the  soldier  should  be  regarded 
less  as  a  wage-earner  and  more  as  "a  kind  of  sub-contractor,  empowered  to 
support  himself  by  a  form  of  petty  entrepreneurship  in  a  family  economy 
based  upon  pillage".69 

The  relationship  of  general  contractors  and  noble  officers  to  their  "em- 
ployers" was  equally  ambiguous.  As  I  have  already  noted,  for  the  employer 
the  attraction  of  using  a  general  contractor  was  that  in  return  for  only  a 
modest  "up-front"  payment,  the  contractor  and  his  network  of  subcontract- 
ing colonels  and  captains,  financiers,  and  munitionnaires,  were  prepared  to 
subsidize  initial  recruitment  costs,  and  then  cover  the  expense  of  paying, 
equipping,  and  supplying  the  troops  until  well  into  the  campaign.  The 
contractor  and  his  network  of  associates  were  thus  not  so  much  employees 
of  the  state  as  its  creditors.  True,  the  use  of  general  contractors  was  phased 
out  after  the  end  of  the  Thirty  Years  War.  But,  as  we  have  seen,  govern- 
ments turned  increasingly  to  their  nobilities,  who  were  expected  to  use 

66  Keen,  The  Laws  ofWar  in  the  Late  Middle  Ages. 

67  Quoted  in  Tilly,  The  Contentious  French,  p.  123. 

68  See  Tallett,  War  and  Society  in  Early-Modern  Europe,  pp.  55-56,  for  a  summary. 

69  Lynn,  "Comments  on  Mercenary  Military  Service  in  Early  Modern  Europe",  p.  7. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


153 


their  personal  resources  to  help  with  the  recruitment,  pay,  and  supply  of 
their  unit.  As  Redlich  has  observed,  regiments  ceased  to  be  the  large-scale 
business  enterprises  of  Wallenstein's  day,  but  they  nevertheless  represented 
an  investment  from  which  the  colonel/captain  might  hope  to  recover  his 
capital  and,  with  any  luck,  generate  a  profit.70  Whether  nobles  did  always 
make  a  profit  is  open  to  doubt:  as  Herve  Drevillon  has  shown  in  the  case 
of  France,  they  acquired  honour  as  a  result  of  military  service,  but  little 
monetary  gain.71  Nevertheless,  the  fact  remains  that  they  were  prepared 
to  subsidize  the  crown,  and  in  this  respect  they  too  were  as  much  creditors 
as  employees  of  the  state. 

There  are,  then,  real  difficulties  in  seeing  the  soldier,  certainly  in  the 
sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  as  a  wage-labourer  who  fought  merely 
for  pay.  However,  the  situation  did  become  clearer  by  the  eighteenth  century. 
As  any  number  of  examples  testify,  the  failure  to  pay  and  supply  troops  and 
the  tacit  approval  of  ransom  and  pillage  as  substitutes  for  regular  wages 
resulted  in  mutiny,  indiscipline,  disorder,  or  desertion.  Any  one  of  these 
could  cause  the  collapse  of  the  army  as  a  fighting  force  and  bring  a  campaign 
to  a  juddering  halt.  As  the  experienced  contractor  Count  Rhingrave,  presci- 
ently  warned,  "The  soldier  cannot  live  on  air  [...]  where  there  is  hunger 
and  necessity,  there  will  arise  disorder."72  A  seventeenth-century  observer 
similarly  noted  that  "The  greatest  weakening  of  an  army  is  disorder.  The 
greatest  cause  of  disorder  is  want  of  pay."73  The  due  d'Estampes  warned 
that  if  he  could  not  provide  for  his  men  they  would  either  desert  or  join  the 
enemy  "because  such  men  follow  the  escu".74  Accordingly,  from  the  mid- 
seventeenth  century,  governments  began,  albeit  falteringly,  to  put  in  place 
a  series  of  linked  initiatives  aimed  at  producing  military  forces  that  were 
more  tightly  controlled  by  the  prince  and  better  supported  by  the  state.  The 
objective  behind  these  initiatives  was  to  improve  military  efficiency  and 
to  turn  armies  into  more  effective  instruments  of  state  power.  As  Michel  le 
Tellier  succinctly  noted,  "To  secure  the  livelihood  of  the  soldier  is  to  secure 
victory  for  the  king."75 

70  Redlich,  The  German  Military  Enterpriser  and  His  Workforce,  II,  pp.  55-62. 

71  Drevillon,  L'impdtdu  sang.  His  archival  sources  probably  lead  him  to  understate  the  costs 
incurred. 

72  Lublinskaya,  Documents  pour  server  a  Thistoire  des  guerres  civiles  en  France,  p.  246. 

73  British  Library,  Thomason  Tracts,  En6(36)  Observations  Concerning  Princes  and  States  upon 
Peace  and  Warre,  1642. 

74  Lublinskaya,  Documents  pour  server  a  I'histoire  des  guerres  civiles  en  France,  p.  97.  See  also 
Donagan,  War  in  England,  7643-49,  pp.  264-267. 

75  Quoted  in  Andre,  Michel  le  Tellier  et  Torganisation  de  I'armee  monarchique,  p.  64. 


154 


FRANK  TALLETT 


First,  governments  sought  to  pay  their  soldiers  regularly  even  if  not 
always  in  full.  The  Dutch  in  many  respects  led  the  way,  and  were  generally 
regarded  as  the  best  -  in  the  sense  of  most  reliable  -  payers  in  the  late 
seventeenth  century.  Not  only  did  the  States  have  access  to  liquid  funds, 
drawn  from  taxes  levied  upon  the  Republic's  thriving  commercial  trade, 
but  they  made  use  of  the  innovation  of  solliciteurs-militair,  businessmen 
who,  in  return  for  an  agreed  monthly  sum,  were  prepared  to  advance 
money  to  a  captain  and  his  company,  thus  ensuring  the  men  their  pay.  A 
formalization  of  the  system  gave  the  solliciteurs-militair  a  monopoly  on 
paying  the  troops  in  return  for  an  agreed  interest  rate  of  6.95  per  cent  on 
all  the  funds  they  advanced.76  The  Dutch  system  of  payment  to  some  extent 
prefigured  what  would  happen  elsewhere.  During  the  War  of  the  Austrian 
Succession  (1741-1749),  for  example,  pay  advances  to  the  troops  in  the  two 
French  armies  operating  in  Germany,  the  armee  de  Baviere  and  the  armee 
de  Westphalie,  were  handled  increasingly  by  a  body  of  specialist  financiers 
such  as  Mauvillain.77  If  soldiers  were  paid  more  routinely,  governments 
nonetheless  took  action  to  ensure  that  there  was  no  scope  for  bargaining 
over  levels  of  pay  and  conditions  of  service.  Thus  the  Landsknecht  regiments 
were  reorganized  into  companies;  their  elected  officers  were  abolished; 
pay  was  tied  to  musters;  and  troops  lost  the  right  to  represent  themselves. 
In  a  similar  way,  employers  sought  means  to  restrict  the  autonomy  of  the 
Swiss  pikemen.78 

Secondly,  paying  the  soldiers  allowed  the  enforcement  of  harsher  dis- 
cipline. As  Everhard  van  Reyd  stated  bluntly,  "One  could  not  hang  those 
[soldiers]  one  did  not  pay",  a  judgement  confirmed  by  General  George 
Monck  who  concluded  that  "if  [the  men]  are  punctually  paid  [...]  then  your 
general  can  with  justice  punish  them  severely".79  By  the  mid-seventeenth 
century,  most  of  the  rules  and  conventions  governing  the  conduct  of  war- 
fare were  already  in  place.80  As  far  as  the  ordinary  soldier  was  concerned, 
these  were  embodied  in  the  articles  of  war  issued  by  commanders  at  the 

76  Van  Nimwegen,  "The  Transformation  of  Army  Organisation",  pp.  170-171, 174-175.  On  the 
collapse  of  Dutch  finances  after  1715,  see  Scott,  "The  Fiscal-Military  State  and  International 
Rivalry  during  the  Long  Eighteenth  Century",  pp.  34-36. 

77  Felix,  "Victualling  Louis  XV's  Armies",  p.  10. 

78  Van  Nimwegen,  "The  Transformation  of  Army  Organisation",  p.  168. 

79  E.  Van  Reyd,  Histoire  der  Nederlantscher  Oorlogen  (Leuwarden,  1650),  p.  324,  quoted  in 
Nickle,  The  Military  Reforms  of  Prince  Maurice  of  Orange,  pp.  90-91;  Monck  quoted  in  Lloyd,  A 
Review  of  the  History  of  Infantry,  p.  182.  See  also  the  comments  of  Maurice  de  Saxe,  Mes  reveries, 
in  Phillips,  Roots  of  Strategy,  p.  106. 

80  Parker,  "Early  Modern  Europe",  p.  41. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


155 


start  of  each  campaign.  The  articles  would  not  be  altered  in  substance, 
though  they  were  greatly  expanded  in  detail,  but  from  the  second  half  of 
the  seventeenth  century  they  began  to  be  enforced  with  a  new  rigour.81  In 
particular,  those  sections  that  forbade  looting,  theft,  and  mistreatment  of 
civilians  were  implemented  in  an  attempt  to  cut  out  or  at  least  restrain 
unlicensed  pillaging.  Marshal  Claude  Villars's  use  of  "the  very  greatest  sever- 
ity" against  breaches  of  discipline  with  respect  to  pillaging  was  typical.82 
All  eighteenth-century  armies  thus  had  their  equivalent  of  the  French 
prevots  de  marechaux  charged  with  keeping  order  in  the  camp  and  on  the 
march,  and  military  courts  were  held  on  a  more  routine  basis  than  they 
had  been  earlier. 

Apart  from  restricting  pillage,  the  enforcement  of  more  rigorous  disci- 
pline had  the  extra  benefit  from  the  commander's  point  of  view  that  raw 
recruits  could  be  made  to  march,  drill,  and  practise  battlefield  manoeuvres. 
Additionally,  troops  could  now  be  obliged  to  perform  duties  such  as  digging 
trenches  and  latrines,  carrying  their  own  baggage,  and  preparing  earthwork 
fortifications.  These  were  duties  that  their  predecessors  had  frequently 
jibbed  at  and  devolved  onto  the  numerous  women  and  other  camp  followers, 
or  onto  civilians  haplessly  pressed  into  service.83  As  Wood  has  noted,  these 
privileges  were  analogous  to  those  of  master-craftsmen,  and  their  existence 
had  meant  that  troops  in  the  first  half  of  our  period  had  "operated  more  like 
skilled  and  somewhat  independent  contract  workers,  and  the  whole  army  as 
a  cross  between  a  warrior  society  and  a  specialized  labor  force".84  Although 
it  is  important  not  to  exaggerate  the  contrasts  with  an  earlier  epoch  and 
to  acknowledge  national  differences  of  practice,  by  the  eighteenth  century 
soldiers  were  increasingly  cowed  and  obedient  products  of  harsh  discipline, 
epitomized  at  the  extreme  by  the  robotic  Prussian  forces,  very  different 
from  the  swaggering  freebooters  of  two  centuries  earlier.85 

As  well  as  restricting  opportunities  for  pillage,  governments  also  denied 
soldiers  the  possibility  of  profit  by  taking  over  responsibility  for  ransom- 
ing prisoners.  Henry  VIII's  Spanish  captains  had  no  counterpart  in  the 

81  Navereau,  Le  logement  et  tes  ustensiles  des  gens  de  guerres ;  Tallett,  War  and  Society  in  Early- 
Modern  Europe,  pp.  123-126. 

82  Villars,  Memoires  du  Marechal  de  Villars,  II,  p.  230. 

83  McNeill,  The  Pursuit  of  Power,  pp.  117-143.  See  plate  6  and  accompanying  inscription  of 
Callot's  "Les  Miseres...de  la  Guerre"  (1633),  depicting  villagers  being  led  away  probably  to  act  as 
labourers:  Daniel,  Callot's  Etchings,  item  271. 

84  Wood,  The  King's  Army,  p.  304. 

85  Kunisch,  Furst-Gesellschaft-Krieg,  pp.  178-182;  and  the  comments  of  Frederick  the  Great  on 
"Prussian  Troops"  in  Military  Instructions. 


156 


FRANK  TALLETT 


eighteenth  century  as  governments  asserted  that  prisoners  became  the 
property  of  the  state  which  would  handle  negotiations  for  their  release  and 
take  the  proceeds  of  any  ransom.  Soldiers  thus  lost  out  financially  on  two 
fronts.  More  positively,  however,  governments  did  begin  to  take  greater  care 
of  the  welfare  of  their  soldiers,  arranging  to  supply  them  directly  with  food, 
equipment,  tobacco,  clothing,  and  housing,  things  that  the  soldier  had  previ- 
ously been  expected  to  purchase  out  of  his  pay.  Again,  the  motivation  was 
not  altruistic  but  pragmatic:  governments  recognized  that  poorly  supplied 
troops  did  not  win  wars.  The  Spanish  Army  of  Flanders  had  led  the  way  in 
this  regard  in  the  sixteenth  century,  but  by  the  1700s  it  was  becoming  com- 
monplace for  governments  to  put  in  place  arrangements  with  large-scale 
civilian  contractors  for  the  supply  of  goods  to  the  army.86  One  unlooked-for 
consequence  of  the  direct  supply  of  clothing  to  the  troops  was  that  there  was 
greater  standardization  of  dress,  leading  to  the  development  of  uniforms 
with  all  that  this  implied  in  terms  of  making  men  more  amenable  to  drill 
and  discipline.87 

To  be  sure,  we  should  not  exaggerate  either  the  extent  of  these  changes  or 
the  abruptness  of  the  breach  with  the  past.  Change  was  gradual  rather  than 
revolutionary.  The  mechanisms  of  state  administration  were  creaky  and 
frequently  broke  down,  leaving  the  soldier  unpaid,  unfed,  and  poorly  clothed. 
Despite  the  harsh  enforcement  of  discipline,  desertion  and  disorder  remained 
common  features  of  armies,  and  civilians  still  suffered  at  their  hands.  The 
number  of  mutinies  certainly  diminished  after  c.  1650,  but  they  still  continued 
to  take  place  and  might  have  serious  repercussions,  as  John  Prebble's  study  of 
Highland  troops  in  British  service  demonstrates.88  Nonetheless,  there  were 
significant  developments  taking  place,  and  the  eighteenth-century  soldier 
may  be  seen  as  more  dependent  than  his  sixteenth-  and  seventeenth-century 
predecessors  on  his  wage  and  goods-in-kind  provided  by  his  employer,  unable 
to  bargain  about  pay  and  terms  of  employment,  increasingly  hemmed  about 
by  regulation,  and  part  of  a  military  machine  in  which  standardization  and 
uniformity  was  becoming  the  norm. 


86  Felix,  "Victualling  Louis  XV's  Armies".  See  also  Cote,  Joseph-Michel  Cadet,  for  the  supply  of 
troops  overseas. 

87  Labourers  in  the  sixteenth-century  French  royal  army  had  been  given  uniforms  to  make 
desertion  harder:  Wood,  The  King's  Army,  p.  166. 

88  Prebble,  Mutiny. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


157 


Social  and  cultural  restraints  on  soldiering;  duration  of  service 

Some  of  the  social  and  cultural  factors  that  influenced  recruitment  -  the 
identification  of  the  nobility  with  military  service  and  the  ability  of  the 
better-off  to  avoid  impressment  and  militia  service  -  have  already  been  al- 
luded to,  but  it  is  appropriate  at  this  point  to  look  at  two  other  socio-cultural 
aspects  of  fighting  for  a  living,  and  also  to  ask  how  long  the  soldier  might 
expect  to  serve.  It  should  be  noted  at  the  outset  that  the  labour  market 
for  soldiers  was  an  international  one  throughout  the  period.  Foreigners 
constituted  a  significant  and  sometimes  the  majority  element  within 
armies.  For  instance,  around  70  per  cent  of  Francis  I's  forces  in  1542  were 
non-native,  though  the  record  probably  goes  to  Sweden:  only  12  per  cent 
of  its  forces  in  1632  were  native.89  Such  examples  may  not  represent  the 
norm,  but  it  nonetheless  remained  common  for  a  ruler  to  have  half  his 
forces  made  up  of  foreigners.  One  reason  for  this  high  percentage  figure  in 
the  sixteenth  century  was  the  need  to  employ  specialist  troops  whose  re- 
cruitment had  a  regional  basis:  Genoese  crossbowmen,  Albanian  stradiots, 
German  Reiter  able  to  perform  the  complex  manoeuvres  associated  with 
the  caracole,  Bohemian  users  of  the  Wagenburg,  Savoyard  light  cavalry,  and 
Swiss  pikemen.  Thus,  in  France  a  memoir  prepared  for  Catherine  de  Medici, 
the  queen  mother,  at  the  start  of  the  first  civil  war  in  1562,  envisaged  using 
foreign  contract  troops  to  provide  53.8  per  cent  of  the  crown's  infantry 
forces  (10.8  per  cent  Swiss,  27  per  cent  German,  8  per  cent  Italian,  and  8  per 
cent  Spanish)  and  48.6  per  cent  of  the  cavalry  (21  per  cent  Flemish,  25.6  per 
cent  German,  2  per  cent  Savoyard).90  The  development  of  general  military 
contracting  further  eroded  the  distinction  between  native  and  non-native 
troops.  The  enterprisers'  polyglot  forces  came  from  every  nationality.  As 
Parrott  observes,  high-quality  soldiers  were  important;  origins  were  not.91 
A  shift  in  the  methods  of  recruitment  after  c.  1650,  with  an  increased  em- 
phasis on  impressment,  militia,  and  recruiting  by  commissioned  captains, 
reasserted  the  importance  of  national  origins,  since  the  captains  were  often 
subjects  of  the  prince  whom  they  served.  Nevertheless,  foreigners  continued 
to  represent  a  substantial  proportion  of  the  state's  forces,  ranging  from  14 
to  60  per  cent  in  the  armies  of  Britain,  France,  Spain,  and  Prussia,  though 
in  the  case  of  the  latter  many  so-called  foreigners  were  actually  recruited 

89  Potter,  A  History  of  France,  7460-7560,  p.  261;  Nordmann,  "L'armee  suedoise  auXVIIe  siecle", 
p.  136. 

90  Wood,  The  King's  Army,  derived  from  table  2.8,  p.  56. 

91  Parrott,  "From  Military  Enterprise  to  Standing  Armies",  p.  82. 


158 


FRANK  TALLETT 


from  Hohenzollern  lands.92  The  pattern  evidenced  by  the  larger  states 
held  good  for  many  smaller  ones  too.  Thus  in  1734  Piedmont  fielded  14,000 
foreigners  and  26,000  native  troops,  the  non-native  contingent  compris- 
ing some  35  per  cent  of  the  total.93  In  the  context  of  increased  army  size, 
non-national  recruitment  remained  a  resource  that  was  too  important 
to  ignore.  One  incidental  consequence  of  the  international  nature  of  the 
labour  market  for  soldiers  was  the  high  levels  of  migration,  particularly 
from  fertile  recruiting  grounds  such  as  sixteenth-century  Italy  and  Ireland 
throughout  the  period.94 

If  national  origins  presented  little  bar  to  army  service,  what  about  gender? 
This  may  seem  a  curious  question  to  pose,  given  that  combatant  soldiers 
were  male.  But  what  John  Lynn  has  called  the  "campaign  community"  com- 
prised a  large  number  of  civilians  -  craftsmen,  lackeys,  tradesmen,  sutlers, 
carters,  and  pawnbrokers,  for  example.  The  army's  "tail"  included  numerous 
women,  though  they  did  not  figure  on  any  muster  lists.95  Their  presence  in 
armies  was  essential.  They  formed  part  of  the  libertine  lifestyle  that  induced 
men  to  sign  on;  and  they  were  integral  to  the  maintenance  and  operation 
of  armies.  They  were  irreplaceable  for  the  performance  of  gender-based 
duties:  laundering,  sewing,  nursing,  prostitution.  They  were  also  expected 
in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries  to  assist  with  siege  work,  digging 
latrines,  foraging,  and  pillaging.  As  governments  acted  to  reduce  pillage 
and  as  the  state's  capacity  to  pay  and  supply  armies  grew  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  so  women's  role  in  securing  food  supplies  declined.  Governments, 
which  had  always  regarded  women  in  armies  as  potentially  troublesome 
and  as  extra  mouths  to  feed,  now  acted  to  restrict  their  numbers.  Fewer 
women  than  previously  marched  with  the  armies,  and  as  numbers  of  women 
diminished  so  too  did  the  soldier's  freewheeling  libertine  lifestyle. 

What  of  the  length  and  terms  of  service?  Sixteenth-century  contract  troops 
were  the  most  privileged  in  these  respects.  Their  period  of  service  was  defined 
by  the  Bestallung  and  was  usually  limited  to  fighting  a  particular  campaign. 
The  contract  also  set  out  the  conditions  of  service.  Thus,  5,000  German  troops 
contracted  for  service  in  Friuli  refused  orders  from  their  Venetian  employers 

92  Thomson,  Mercenaries,  Pirates  and  Sovereigns,  p.  29  table  2.1,  pp.  26-32;  Fann,  "Foreigners 
in  the  Prussian  Army";  Duffy,  The  Army  of  Maria  Theresa,  p.  55. 

93  Loriga,  Soldats  -  Un  laboratoire  disciplinaire,  pp.  36-37,  and  tables  1/1  and  1/3,  pp.  237-239. 

94  Dubost,  La  France  italienne  au  XVIe  etXVIIe  siecles,  esp.  pp.  60-65;  Arfaioli,  The  Black 
Bands  of  Giovanni;  Henry,  "Wild  Geese  in  Spanish  Flanders",  p.  193;  Genet  Rouff lac  and  Murphy, 
Franco-Irish  Military  Connections,  isgo-rg45. 

95  Lynn,  Women,  Armies,  and  Warfare  in  Early  Modern  Europe;  Wilson,  "German  Women  and 
War,  1500-1800". 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


159 


redirecting  them  to  the  fleet  because  their  original  contract  had  ruled  out 
their  use  at  sea.96  Additionally,  they  were  in  theory  free  to  choose  their  em- 
ployer, though  in  practice  this  choice  might  be  restricted,  since  governments 
in  the  sixteenth  century  felt  it  worthwhile  paying  retainers  to  contractors  to 
ensure  first  call  on  their  services  in  the  event  of  hostilities.97  The  hard-won 
victory  of  Francis  I  against  the  Swiss  at  Marignano  (September  1515)  ironically 
encouraged  the  French  to  make  permanent  treaties  with  the  Swiss  cantons  to 
ensure  a  monopoly  over  their  outstanding  pikemen.98  Moreover,  the  leaders  of 
contract  forces  sometimes  received  grants  of  land  and  titles  that  made  it  hard 
for  them  to  switch  sides;  they  were  reluctant  to  change  during  a  campaign 
lest  they  lose  arrears  of  pay  and  taxes  from  their  current  employer;  and  they 
had  to  consider  geographical  proximity  and  political  relationships  with  a 
prospective  employer  before  signing  any  contract. 

Unlike  sixteenth-century  contract  troops,  volunteers  who  signed  on  with 
a  captain  made  an  open-ended  agreement,  to  serve  until  disbandment  at  the 
end  of  the  campaign  or  the  war,  whenever  that  might  be.  In  practice,  troops 
were  frequently  laid  off  in  the  autumn,  especially  in  the  first  half  of  our 
period.  Impressed  men  had  no  choice  with  regard  to  the  length  and  terms 
of  employment,  and  there  was  a  trend  in  the  eighteenth  century,  especially 
in  some  German  states,  to  extend  the  period  of  service  dramatically.  For 
example,  service  in  the  Prussian  army  for  those  who  had  been  forcibly 
drafted  was  theoretically  for  an  unlimited  period,  though  it  was  restricted 
to  twenty  years  in  1792.  In  practice,  however,  many  recruits  were  discharged 
early,  and  most  received  long  periods  of  furlough  allowing  them  to  return 
home  at  harvest  time.99  The  extension  of  periods  of  service  went  alongside 
a  trend  towards  retaining  a  body  of  men  throughout  the  year,  leading  to  the 
establishment  of  permanent  forces.  True,  this  was  not  a  novelty.  Standing 
armies  had  emerged  in  many  polities  during  the  fifteenth  century,  and 
rulers  additionally  endeavoured  to  secure  the  ongoing  availability  of  forces 
(not  quite  the  same  thing)  by  paying  retainers  to  military  contractors  and 
through  treaties  with  the  Swiss  cantons,  as  I  have  noted.  But  from  the  late 
seventeenth  century  onwards,  the  number  of  soldiers  retained  by  the  state 
throughout  the  year  grew  quite  significantly.100  The  need  for  peacetime 
forces  grew  with  the  decline  of  traditional  and  general  contracting  which 

96  Mallett  and  Hale,  The  Military  Organization  of  a  Renaissance  State,  p.  319. 

97  See  ibid.,  pp.  322-323;  Parker,  The  Army  of  Flanders  and  the  Spanish  Road,  p.  39,  for  examples. 

98  Potter,  A  History  of  France,  7460-7560,  pp.  264-265. 

99  Wilson,  "Social  Militarization  in  Eighteenth  Century  Germany",  pp.  5, 16. 

100  Tallett  and  Trim,  '"Then  Was  Then  and  Now  is  Now'",  p.  22,  and  Gunn,  "War  and  the  Emer- 
gence of  the  State",  pp.  54-58. 


160 


FRANK  TALLETT 


made  it  harder  to  hire  an  army  "off  the  shelf".  A  permanently  retained  body 
of  forces,  especially  if  they  were  veterans,  provided  the  core  around  which 
the  army  could  be  expanded  rapidly  in  wartime. 

Once  enrolled  in  the  army,  all  soldiers  were  forbidden  to  desert,  and 
only  sixteenth-century  contract  troops  had  the  opportunity  (at  least  in 
theory)  of  changing  sides  during  a  war  should  the  current  employer  not 
fulfil  his  side  of  the  agreement.  Desertion  and  enlisting  with  the  enemy 
were  offences  that  figured  in  all  military  codes  of  conduct.  As  with  much 
else  to  do  with  army  life,  there  were  efforts  from  c.  1650  onwards  to  enforce 
these  twin  aspects  of  the  disciplinary  codes  in  an  attempt  to  enhance  the 
fighting  efficiency  of  armies. 

Aggregate  contract  to  state  commission  armies? 

Our  review  of  early  modern  soldiers  suggests  that  the  broad  outlines  con- 
cerning the  evolution  of  army  style  advanced  by  John  Lynn  in  1996  hold 
good.101  The  aggregate  contract  army  (1450-1650)  was  indeed  pieced  together 
by  a  variety  of  voluntary  and  involuntary  methods,  as  well  as  through  a 
quasi-feudal  procedure  that  was  a  mixture  of  the  two.  The  second  half  of  our 
period  (1650-1790)  witnessed  the  development  of  the  state  commission  army, 
a  military  force  that  was  both  better  supported  by  the  state  and  more  tightly 
controlled  by  the  prince.  Regulation,  discipline,  and  uniformity  increasingly 
became  the  order  of  the  day,  and  there  was  a  growing  move  towards  the 
direct  state  supply  of  goods  that  the  soldier  had  previously  been  expected 
to  provide  himself,  albeit  this  was  generally  conducted  through  the  employ- 
ment of  private  financiers  and  merchants.  Numbers  of  soldiers  increased, 
and  the  period  witnessed  the  development  of  an  existing  trend  towards 
the  maintenance  of  standing  forces.  The  Spanish  Army  of  Flanders  and  the 
Swedes  had  been  the  paradigm  forces  in  the  period  1500-1650.  After  that 
point,  two  competing  models  emerged:  the  Dutch,  who  used  subsidy  forces, 
and  the  French  army  under  Louis  XIV,  the  latter  being  displaced  by  the  Prus- 
sians, who  became  the  paradigm  for  Europeans  from  the  mid-eighteenth 
century  until  their  defeats  during  the  Wars  of  the  French  Revolution  and 
debacle  in  1806.  However,  if  the  broad  outlines  of  Lynn's  thesis  remain  intact, 
some  amendments  are  called  for,  as  he  has  acknowledged. 

It  is  important  to  stress  the  continuing  importance  of  both  entrepreneur- 
ship  and  the  nobility  in  recruiting  and  supporting  armies  throughout  the 


101  Lynn,  "The  Evolution  of  Army  Style  in  the  Modern  West". 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


161 


period  and  not  just  between  1500  and  1650.  Traditional  contracting  as  well 
as  general  contracting  did  go  into  steep  decline  after  the  mid-seventeenth 
century.  Yet  the  commercialization  of  warfare  continued  in  two  important 
respects.  First,  the  role  of  the  nobility,  who  had  always  been  integral  to  the 
raising  of  forces,  was  developed  in  novel  ways.  Monarchs  continued  to  play 
upon  the  longstanding  twinning  of  military  service  and  noble  status  to 
persuade  their  elites  both  to  join  the  army  and  to  bring  men  with  them.  As 
we  have  seen,  in  some  armies,  most  notably  that  of  France,  the  introduction 
of  a  system  of  venality  further  encouraged  them  to  use  their  private  wealth 
and  influence  to  recruit  and  support  troops  in  the  hope  of  a  profit  in  the 
long  term.  Elsewhere,  the  hope  of  profit  from  the  management  of  a  company 
similarly  persuaded  them  to  put  their  money  and  prestige  at  the  service  of 
the  monarch.  The  regiment  was  undoubtedly  under  greater  state  control  in 
the  eighteenth  century,  but  entrepreneurship  endured.  We  should  not  be 
surprised  by  this  continued  use  of  the  nobility,  for  much  recent  scholarship 
has  stressed  the  extent  to  which  rulers,  even  in  supposedly  "absolute"  states, 
relied  upon  negotiation  and  compromise  with  the  social  and  financial 
elites  -  whether  these  comprised  the  traditional  nobility,  members  of  the 
court,  provincial  worthies,  administrative  and  legal  personnel,  merchants, 
or  others  -  to  conduct  business.  This  was  especially  the  case  with  respect 
to  the  creation  and  maintenance  of  an  army,  a  body  of  a  size  and  cost 
unmatched  by  any  other  institution  in  the  state.  As  David  Parrott  has 
noted,  "The  creation  or  transformation  of  an  army  is  not  some  act  of  will 
imposed  by  the  ruler  upon  a  passive  body  of  subjects.  Armies  and  military 
institutions  represent  the  relationship  between  rulers  and  political  elites."102 
The  commercialization  of  warfare  endured  in  a  second  way.  A  number  of 
mainly  German  polities,  but  also  Savoy  and  Sweden  for  brief  periods,  began 
to  lease  their  forces  to  larger,  and  richer,  states  in  return  for  the  payment 
of  subsidies.  The  hire  of  soldiers  for  monetary  gain  to  the  highest  bidder, 
with  little  regard  for  the  welfare  of  the  men  involved,  has  led  to  it  being 
described  slightingly  as  Soldatenhandel  (soldier-trade);  and  the  ruler  of 
Hesse-Cassel  in  particular  has  been  vilified  for  apparently  bemoaning  the 
fact  that  "only"  1,465  of  his  subjects  were  killed  at  the  battle  of  Trenton  when 
the  British  paid  a  premium  for  those  killed  in  action  rather  than  for  those 
wounded  or  captured.103  Of  course,  we  should  not  exaggerate  the  commercial 
aspect  of  this  soldier-trade.  As  Peter  Wilson  has  demonstrated,  much  more 

102  Parrott,  "From  Military  Enterprise  to  Standing  Armies",  p.  77. 

103  Ingrao,  The  Hessian  Mercenary  State,  p.  1;  Wilson,  War,  State  and  Society  in  Wurttemberg, 
pp.  74-77,  reviews  the  literature. 


162 


FRANK  TALLETT 


than  money  was  involved,  the  princes  who  hired  out  their  subjects  being 
concerned  at  least  as  much  with  the  political,  dynastic,  and  diplomatic 
returns  to  be  gained.  Indeed,  the  purely  cash  profits  were  frequently  quite 
small  or  non-existent,  most  of  the  subsidy  being  eaten  up  by  the  costs  of 
recruitment.  Among  the  fortunate  few  to  turn  a  monetary  profit  were 
Hanover  and  the  much  smaller  Ansbach-Bayreuth  in  1797.  Hesse-Cassel  too 
stood  out  by  virtue  of  its  exceptionality  in  making  large  profits  from  the 
soldier-trade.  Moreover,  German  states  were  discriminating  when  choosing 
subsidy  partners,  not  always  going  for  the  highest  bidder;  and  contracts 
generally  contained  clauses  protecting  the  rights  of  the  soldiers  by,  for 
instance,  insisting  that  they  be  kept  together  as  a  unit  and  operate  under 
the  command  of  their  own  officers.  Nevertheless,  even  when  these  caveats 
are  taken  into  account,  there  remained  an  important  commercial  aspect 
to  this  Kriegshandwerk,  or  "warcraft".104 

The  Soldatenhandel  poses  a  more  significant  difficulty  for  Lynn's  tax- 
onomy of  army  style,  which  needs  to  be  adjusted  accordingly,  as  he  has 
proposed.105  This  is  because  these  hired  regiments  exhibited  characteristics 
both  of  mercenary  forces  and  of  conscript  troops  at  the  same  time.  The 
term  "mercenary"  in  the  early  modern  period  has  to  be  defined  with  care. 
Modern  definitions  centre  upon  the  tripartite  notions  of  fighting  for  pay, 
foreign  service,  and  professionalism,  and  these  have  frequently  and  inap- 
propriately been  transposed  to  the  early  modern  period.106  However,  none 
of  these  qualities  quite  captures  the  essence  of  mercenary  service  in  early 
modern  Europe.  First,  after  c.  1650  all  soldiers  expected  to  be  paid,  but 
that  did  not  make  them  all  mercenaries.  Before  1650  pay  was  only  one 
form  of  compensation  for  soldiering.  Yet  even  if  we  extend  the  concept  of 
monetary  reward  beyond  pay  to  include  the  profits  that  soldiers  hoped  to 
make  from  ransoms  and  from  pillage,  this  does  not  take  us  much  further, 
since  again  all  hoped  to  make  a  profit  in  this  fashion.  Secondly,  the  notion  of 
foreign  service  is  potentially  misleading.  To  be  sure,  there  is  some  reason  to 

104  Wilson,  "The  German  'Soldier-Trade'  of  the  Seventeenth  and  Eighteenth  Centuries",  War, 
State  and  Society  in  Wurttemberg,  pp.  84,  89;  Ingrao,  The  Hessian  Mercenary  State,  p.  127. 

105  Lynn,  "Comments  on  Mercenary  Military  Service  in  Early  Modern  Europe",  pp.  1-3. 

106  For  a  recent  definition,  see  United  Nations  General  Assembly,  Report  of  the  Ad  Hoc  Com- 
mittee on  the  Drafting  of  an  International  Convention  against  the  Recruitment,  Use  and  Training 
of  Mercenaries  (1982).  M.  Mallett  stresses  the  concepts  of  fighting  for  profit  and  foreignness 
("Mercenaries",  p.  209),  though  De  Vries  takes  issue  with  this  definition  ("Medieval  Mercenar- 
ies"). See  also  the  comments  by  France  in  the  same  volume  ("Introduction").  For  an  excellent 
overview  of  early  modern  mercenaries,  see  Sikora,  "Soldner".  The  diary  of  Peter  Hagendorf 
provides  first-hand  testimony  into  the  life  of  a  seventeenth-century  mercenary:  Hagendorf  and 
Peters,  Ein  Soldnerleben  im  Dreifiigjahrigen  Krieg. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


163 


equate  mercenaries  with  foreigners  because  many  of  them  in  the  sixteenth 
century  were  specialists  with  some  regional  basis  for  their  recruitment. 
The  instances  of  the  Genoese  crossbowmen,  Albanian  stradiots,  German 
Landsknechte  and  Reiter,  Savoyard  light  cavalry,  and  Swiss  pikemen  have 
already  been  noted.107  But  all  early  modern  armies  contained  large  numbers 
of  "foreign"  troops,  not  all  of  whom  were  described  as  mercenaries  and, 
conversely,  there  were  many  native  recruits  who  volunteered  to  serve  their 
ruler  but  who  would  be  described  as  mercenaries.  Thus,  Thomas  Churchyard 
referred  to  "mercenaries"  taken  by  the  Earl  of  Essex  to  Ireland,  even  though 
they  were  mostly  men  from  Queen  Elizabeth's  domains.108  Finally,  profes- 
sionalism: this  has  to  do  with  expertise,  standards,  and  longevity  in  service 
and,  while  well-established  mercenary  units,  such  as  the  Landsknechte 
and  Reiter  for  example,  would  be  expected  to  display  these  characteristics, 
professionalism  could  equally  be  a  characteristic  of  non-mercenary  forces.109 

These  points  are  thrown  into  sharper  focus  if  we  establish  what  the  iden- 
tifying characteristics  of  the  early  modern  mercenary  actually  were.  First 
was  the  notion  that  they  were  "hyred  souldiers",  as  one  sixteenth-century 
chronicler  put  it.110  A  second  and  related  point  was  the  notion  of  free  agency. 
The  mercenary  was  not  obliged  to  fight,  by  reason  of  feudal  obligation  or 
impressment,  for  example.  He  had  a  choice  about  whether  to  serve.  Finally, 
the  mercenary  had  no  interest  in  the  cause  but  fought  simply  for  his  own 
private  interest.  It  is  the  second  of  these  three,  interlocking  characteristics 
that  raises  problems  for  the  classification  of  the  eighteenth-century  Sol- 
datenhandel.  The  soldiers  involved  in  it  were  hired,  and  they  had  no  direct 
interest  in  the  cause,  and  in  these  twin  respects  they  were  mercenaries,  but 
many  of  them  were  not  free  agents  since  they  had  been  forcibly  recruited  into 
their  ruler's  army,  either  through  impressment  or  the  militia  system  (or  some 
variant  of  it).  This  implies  the  need  for  a  new  category  in  Lynn's  taxonomy. 
He  suggests  a  hybrid  category,  that  of  the  "conscript-mercenary".111 

Discussion  of  mercenaries  leads  to  a  final  area  in  which  Lynn's  model 
needs  to  be  adjusted.  He  points  to  the  unreliability  of  the  aggregate  contract 

107  Though  these  contingents  were  actually  not  as  homogeneous  as  is  usually  supposed  and 
the  geographical  origins  of  "German"  or  "Swiss"  units  could  be  quite  diverse.  The  Swiss  were 
occasionally  referred  to  as  "Allemans",  and  Landsknechte  could  be  recruited  in  Guelders,  the 
Vaud,  and  Savoy:  Baumann,  Landsknecht;  Potter,  Renaissance  France,  p.  131. 

108  The  Fortunate  Farewell  to  the  Most  Forward  and  Noble  Earl  of  Essex  (London,  1599),  inNichols, 
The  Progresses  and  Public  Progressions  of  Queen  Elizabeth,  p.  433. 

109  Trim,  The  Chivalric  Ethos  and  the  Development  of  Military  Professionalism,  esp.  pp.  3-30. 

110  Quoted  in  Trim,  "Fighting  'Jacob's  Wars'",  p.  80. 

111  Lynn,  "Comments  on  Mercenary  Military  Service  in  Early  Modern  Europe",  pp.  7-8. 


164 


FRANK  TALLETT 


army  largely  because  it  "was  composed  in  the  main  of  mercenary  bands" 
with  the  consequence  that  troops  felt  little  loyalty  to  the  ruler  they  fought 
for  and  were  ready  to  turn  on  their  employer,  to  pillage  his  subjects,  and  to 
mutiny.112  But  is  such  a  judgement  on  mercenaries  justified?  Early  modern 
contemporaries  certainly  had  a  low  opinion  of  them,  but  this  sprang  from 
a  distaste  for  men  who  made  war  a  profession  rather  than  a  vocation,  not 
from  any  criticism  of  their  fighting  abilities.113  So  long  as  they  were  paid, 
mercenaries  were  loyal  and  prepared  to  fight  to  the  death  if  necessary. 
Thus,  at  the  battle  of  Dreux  (1562)  the  whole  Landsknecht  regiment  fight- 
ing for  the  Protestants  was  killed  or  captured  while  there  were  very  high 
casualties  among  the  Swiss  infantry  fighting  in  the  royal  army.114  Potter 
has  concluded  that  in  the  sixteenth  century  mercenaries  were  employed 
precisely  because  "they  were  the  best  men  available  [...]  and  usually,  they  did 
their  job  effectively";  and  Parrott  reaches  similar  conclusions  with  respect 
to  the  forces  of  the  general  contractors  of  the  subsequent  century.115  Thus 
the  employment  of  mercenaries  did  not  of  itself  render  an  army  unreliable: 
quite  the  contrary,  for  they  proved  loyal  and  effective  fighters.  Failure  to 
pay  them  meant  they  downed  arms,  mutinied,  and  turned  to  pillage.  But,  as 
I  noted  earlier,  this  was  what  all  troops  did  in  such  circumstances,  though 
mercenaries  may  have  attracted  the  greatest  attention  and  opprobrium. 
Whatever  its  composition,  any  army  that  went  without  pay  and  supplies 
was  liable  to  desertion,  mutiny,  disorder,  and  pillage. 

The  drivers  of  change 

John  Lynn's  taxonomy  proposing  a  shift  from  an  aggregate  contract  to  a  state 
commission  army  in  the  early  modern  period  thus  appears  broadly  correct. 
But  what  were  the  reasons  for  the  change?  Technological  innovation  has 
traditionally  been  privileged  as  an  explanatory  factor  in  military  matters. 
However,  what  is  notable  about  the  period  as  a  whole  is  the  relative  lack  of 
novelty  with  regard  to  weapons  systems  and  the  slowness  of  their  deploy- 

112  Lynn,  "The  Evolution  of  Army  Style  in  the  Modern  West",  p.  517. 

113  This  was  a  significant  factor  for  Machiavelli,  who  deplored  "men  who  make  war  their 
only  calling",  even  though  he  also  had  little  regard  for  their  loyalty  and  fighting  qualities.  See 
Machiavelli,  Arte  della  Guerra:  Machiavelli,  The  Art  of  War,  Wood  (ed.),  p.  20. 

114  Wood,  The  King's  Army,  pp.  120, 199. 

115  Potter,  Renaissance  France  at  War,  p.  151;  Parrott,  "From  Military  Enterprise  to  Standing 
Armies",  pp.  83-85.  See  too  the  favourable  comments  on  mercenaries  in  fifteenth-century  Italy 
in  Mallett,  Mercenaries  and  Their  Masters,  pp.  185, 195-198,  242. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


165 


ment.  Pikes  gradually  gave  way  to  hand-held  firearms,  and  artillery  came 
to  have  a  significant  place  on  the  battlefield,  but  the  pace  of  innovation 
was  slow,  and  of  itself  purely  technological  innovation  played  little  part  in 
the  transformation  of  army  style. 

Rather  than  highlighting  the  "material  technology"  of  conflict  as  a  driver 
of  change,  we  would  do  better  to  concentrate  on  the  "social  technology"116 
of  warfare,  especially  the  role  of  discipline,  army  size,  and  institutional 
structures.  As  noted  earlier,  one  of  the  features  of  the  state  commission 
army  was  the  attempt  to  enforce  higher  standards  of  discipline.  Contrary  to 
what  has  been  argued  by  proponents  of  the  "military  revolution",  discipline 
was  not  primarily  imposed  as  a  means  of  ensuring  that  soldiers  were  able 
to  handle  their  weapons  and  manoeuvre  effectively  on  the  battlefield, 
though  these  were  certainly  significant  byproducts.117  Rather,  discipline 
was  necessary  to  avoid  the  resort  to  pillaging,  mutiny,  and  disorder  that 
all  too  often  paralysed  armies  in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries. 
This  was  why  the  enforcement  of  discipline  was  only  one  of  a  package  of 
measures  designed  to  address  these  issues:  paying  soldiers  more  regularly; 
supplying  them  directly  with  items  such  as  clothing,  food,  equipment,  and 
housing;  taking  ransoms  out  of  the  hands  of  ordinary  soldiers;  restricting 
the  number  of  women  and  "hangers-on"  who  travelled  with  the  army;  and 
limiting  the  ability  of  elite  units  to  bargain  over  pay  and  conditions. 

The  rationale  behind  all  these  measures  was  the  urgent  necessity  of 
making  armies  more  effective  as  instruments  of  state  power.  This  was  also 
why  the  number  of  men  under  arms  increased,  albeit  not  in  linear  fashion, 
for  quantity  was  as  important  as  quality.  A  large  military  establishment 
allowed  states  to  recover  from  defeat,  to  replace  a  routed  field  army,  to 
sustain  the  demands  of  attritional  warfare,  and  to  occupy  and  control 
territory.  To  be  sure,  it  could  be  argued  that  in  imposing  greater  central 
control  of  their  armies,  governments  were  seeking  to  save  money,  and  it  was 
true  that  they  were  mindful  of  the  desirability  of  curbing  the  activities  of 
corrupt  captains  who  swindled  their  own  men  and  the  royal  treasury.  But  a 
search  for  economies  was  not  what  drove  the  transition  away  from  aggregate 
contract  armies,  since  the  state  commission  forces  actually  cost  more  than 
their  predecessors.  They  may  possibly  have  been  "cheaper  man  for  man","8 
yet  overall  they  were  much  more  expensive.  They  were  more  regularly  paid, 
they  required  more  state-provided  goods  and  services,  and  they  were  far 

116  Lynn,  "Clio  in  Arms",  p.  92. 

117  Rogers,  The  Military  Revolution  Debate,  is  the  best  introduction  to  the  debate. 

118  Lynn,  "The  Evolution  of  Army  Style  in  the  Modern  West",  p.  519. 


166 


FRANK  TALLETT 


more  numerous  than  their  predecessors  and  consequently  more  costly. 
Thus,  Joel  Felix  estimates  the  additional  costs  to  the  French  treasury  of  the 
War  of  the  Austrian  Succession  and  the  Seven  Years  War  at  a  staggering 
2-2.5  billion  Livres  tournois.119  Though  eighteenth-century  governments 
had  a  larger  resource  base  on  which  to  draw  by  comparison  with  their 
predecessors,  the  result  of  demographic  growth  and  a  burgeoning  (and 
increasingly  global)  economy,  military  costs  nevertheless  ran  well  ahead  of 
resources.  To  bridge  the  funding  gap,  eighteenth-century  rulers  resorted  to 
a  range  of  measures  which  varied  from  state  to  state,  including  raising  levels 
of  taxation,  making  use  of  loans,  and  expropriating  resources,  albeit  with 
varying  degrees  of  success.120  It  was  not,  then,  a  search  for  economies  that 
drove  the  transition  from  aggregate  contract  to  state  commission  armies, 
but  rather  an  attempt  to  make  armies  more  fit  for  purpose  even  if  this  meant 
at  its  most  basic  level  that  the  army  simply  stayed  in  existence. 

We  should  finally  recognize  that  what  informed  governments  in  their 
search  for  military  efficiency  was  the  intensely  competitive  relationship 
that  existed  between  the  states  of  western  Europe  that  all  too  often  spilled 
over  into  open  conflict.  The  reasons  for  war  were  many  and  varied:  dynastic 
claims,  religion,  trade  rivalry,  territorial  aggrandizement,  and  the  pursuit 
of  gloire.  Yet  whatever  the  precise  cause  of  conflict,  western  Europe  was  in 
a  constant  condition  of  tension,  and  sensible  governments  used  intervals 
of  peace  to  prepare  for  the  next  round  of  conflict.  No  wonder  they  were 
concerned  with  the  war-waging  capacities  of  their  armies,  for  the  fate  of  rul- 
ers and  even  of  states  might  be  decided  by  their  military  capacities.  Portugal, 
Siena,  and  Scotland  were  absorbed  by  their  larger  neighbours  as  a  result  of 
failures  in  military  campaigns,  just  as  military  success  was  crucial  to  the 
establishment  of  an  independent  polity  in  the  case  of  the  Dutch  Republic. 
In  1742,  France  and  others  planned  to  dismember  Austria,  Prussia  narrowly 
escaped  such  a  fate  at  the  commencement  of  the  Seven  Years  War,  Sweden's 
dearly  won  Baltic  empire  was  taken  from  it,  and  in  1772  Poland  suffered  the 
first  of  the  partitions  that  would  remove  it  from  the  map  until  1919.  This 
intensely  competitive  nature  of  the  European  state  system  was  what  the 
eminent  jurist  Emerich  Vattel  had  in  mind  when  he  argued  for  a  pre-emptive 
right  of  self-defence  by  coalitions  of  states  against  over-mighty  neighbours.121 

119  Felix,  "Victualling  Louis  XV's  Armies",  p.  1. 

120  Scott,  "The  Fiscal-Military  State  and  International  Rivalry  during  the  Long  Eighteenth 
Century",  esp.  pp.  34-40, 42-43.  On  French  finances,  see  Felix  and  Tallett,  "The  French  Experience, 
1661-1815",  PP-  ^SS-^Slt  160-162, 164-165. 

121  Vattel,  The  Law  of  Nations  or  the  Principles  of  Natural  Law,  bk3  ch.  3. 


SOLDIERS  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE,  C.  1500-1790 


167 


The  pressures  to  "keep  up"  in  military  terms  by  imitating  or  adapting 
perceived  best  practice  of  paradigm  armies  were  therefore  intense.  It  should 
be  stressed  that  these  competitive  pressures  did  not  operate  in  some  simple 
fashion.  All  states  had  regard  to  their  own  particular  circumstances.  Some 
emphasized  the  use  of  impressment  and  militia  service  over  the  recruitment 
of  volunteers;  some  preferred  to  hire  troops,  others  to  take  subsidies;  some 
employed  especially  harsh  discipline;  some  -  and  Austria  would  be  an 
example  -  were  notably  slow  and  inefficient  in  providing  for  their  soldiers. 
Yet  the  direction  of  travel  was  clear:  larger  armies,  stricter  discipline,  more 
direct  state  supply,  and  greater  state  control.  The  consequences  for  soldier- 
labour  were  profound.122 


122  It  should  also  be  stressed  that  interstate  competition  did  not  lead  inevitably  to  the  emergence 
of  the  so-called  absolutist  or  modern  state  in  some  Weberian  fashion.  There  were  a  number  of 
different  national  trajectories  that  could  eventuate  in  the  emergence  of  more  or  less  coercive, 
absolutist  states  that  existed  alongside  polities  with  quite  different  constitutional  structures 
though  all  had  responded  to  the  demands  of  warfare.  See  James,  "Warfare  and  the  Rise  of  the 
State",  pp.  28-29  and  passim. 


The  Scottish  mercenary  as  a  migrant 
labourer  in  Europe,  1550-16501 

James  Miller 


Between  1550  and  1650  the  government  in  Scotland,  whether  as  the  monarch 
or  as  the  Privy  Council  acting  in  the  royal  name,  permitted  more  than  sixty 
levies  of  troops  to  fight  in  continental  Europe.  This  occurred  throughout 
the  period  of  study  but  with  peaks  in  the  1570s  and  the  1620S-1640S,  cor- 
responding with  periods  of  fighting  in  the  Low  Countries  and  later  in  the 
Germanic  lands  in  the  Thirty  Years  War  (1618-1648).  This  is  summarized  in 
Table  6.1.  As  the  raising  of  soldiers  to  fight  overseas  also  took  place  before 
and  after  these  dates  and  as  there  were  unofficial  levies,  despite  attempts 
to  stop  them  for  fear  of  unrest  or  political  embarrassment,  the  true  extent  of 
recruitment  of  men  to  fight  overseas  may  never  be  fully  known.  The  size  of 
a  licensed  levy  varied  considerably,  from  as  few  as  sixty  men  in  the  licences 
granted  to  Patrik  Murray  on  25  March  1602  for  service  in  the  Low  Countries 
and  to  Thomas  Moffat  on  23  July  1635  for  Swedish  service  in  Prussia,  to  as 
many  as  several  thousands.  In  at  least  some  instances,  for  example  for  the 
3,000  men  each  to  Robert  Earl  of  Nithsdale,  Alexander  Lord  Spynie,  and 
James  Sinclair  of  Murkle  on  3  April  1627  for  Danish  service,  these  ambitious 
targets  were  not  reached;  and  in  the  case  of  others,  for  example  to  Robert 
Stewart  for  Poland  in  1623,  very  little,  if  any,  recruiting  took  place.  The 
more  usual  figures  mentioned  in  the  licences  are  200  or  300  men.  With  a 
proviso  in  mind  about  the  accuracy  and  reliability  of  these  figures,  it  has 
been  estimated  that  during  the  Thirty  Years  War  (1618-1648),  when  the 
recruitment  of  soldiers  for  overseas  service  was  at  its  height,  as  many  as 
50,000  Scotsmen  bore  arms  in  European  conflicts.2 


1  I  am  grateful  to  Dr  David  Worthington,  Head  of  the  Centre  for  History,  University  of  the 
Highlands  and  Islands,  Dornoch,  Scotland,  for  his  help  and  encouragement  with  this  paper. 

2  Murdoch,  "Introduction",  p.  19.  Steve  Murdoch  and  Alexia  Grosjean  have  produced  a  da- 
tabase on  Scots  active  in  the  military  and  other  walks  of  life  in  northern  Europe  in  the  period 
between  1580  and  1707;  this  can  be  accessed  at  http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/ssne. 


170 


JAMES  MILLER 


Table  6.1  A  summary  of  some  recruitment  of  soldiers  in  Scotland  between  1550  and  1650  to 
join  continental  armies,  as  detailed  in  the  Register  of  the  Privy  Council  of  Scotland  (RPCS) 
and  other  sources.  Some  of  the  levies  failed  to  achieve  much  or  to  reach  the  designated 
target  numbers. 


Year   Destination     Number  of  men  designated  in  the     Source  (all  RPCS* 
source,  with  name  of  senior  officer    unless  otherwise 


or  recruiter  in  some  instances 

stated) 

1552 

France 

300  footmen  and  400  cavalry,  fol- 

1, pp.  131-136 

lowed  by  recruitment  of  "2  ensigns" 

(Gilbert  Kennedy,  3rd  Earl  of  Cassilis) 

1564 

Denmark 

2,000 

XIV,  p.XLVII 

1568 

Denmark 

Unknown  (Captain  Moncur) 

1,  p.  640 

1573 

Sweden 

1,600  (Archibald  Ruthven) 

II,  p.  235 

1573 

Sweden 

300  (Captain  Campbell) 

II,  p.  238 

1573 

Low  Countries 

900,  under  three  separate  licences;  it 

II,  pp.  237,256. 

is  likely  that  many  more  went  without 

licence 

1577 

Low  Countries 

13  licences  issued  -  numbers  of  men 

II,  p.  643 

or  Flanders 

not  specified  but  possibly  3,500 

1577 

Danzig 

150  (Captain  Rentoun) 

II,  p.  621 

1578 

Low  Countries 

200 

III,  p.  23 

1578 

"Protestant 

100 

III,  p.  213 

service 

abroad"  (Low 

Countries?) 

1602 

Low  Countries 

460  (including  licence  to  Patrik 

VI,  p.  721 

Murray) 

1602 

Sweden 

Unknown  (Colonel  Thomas  Ogilvie) 

Fischer,  p.  70** 

1605 

Sweden 

1,600  foot  and  600  cavalry  (Sir  James 

Fischer,  p.  71** 

Spens) 

1607 

Sweden 

200  cavalry  (Robert  Kinnaird) 

Fischer,  p.  71** 

1610 

Sweden 

Unknown 

VIII,  p.  619 

1612 

Sweden 

300  (Andrew  Ramsay's  illegal  levy) 

IX,  p.  430 

1620 

Bohemia 

1,500  (Sir  Andrew  Gray) 

XII,  pp.  255-259 

1621 

Unknown 

100 

XII,  p.  412 

1622 

Low  Countries 

Unknown  (Archibald  Campbell, 

XIII,  p.  LVI 

7th  Earl  of  Argyle's  recruitment  for 

Spanish  service) 

1623 

Poland 

8,000  (Robert  Stewart) 

XIII,  p.  LVII 

1624 

Sweden 

1,200  (James  Spens) 

XIII,  p.  478 

THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650  171 


Year 

Destination 

Number  of  men  designated  in  the 
source,  wim  name  ot  senior  omcer 
or  recruiter  in  some  instances 

Source  (all  RPCS* 
unless  oinerwise 
stated) 

1625 

Count  Mans- 

300 

2nd  ser.,  1,  p.  49 

feld's  army 

(Palatinate) 

1626 

Denmark 

Possibly  3,000  (Sir  Donald  Mackay, 

2nd  ser.,  1,  p.  244 

(later  Sweden) 

Lord  Reay) 

1627 

Denmark 

9,000  (probably  fewer  than  5,000 

2nd  ser.,  1,  p.  565 

recruited)  (Nithsdale-Spynie-Murkle 

levies) 

1628 

Sweden 

300  (James  Spens) 

2nd  ser.,  II,  p.  397 

1629 

Low  Countries 

Unknown  (Hay  of  Kinfauns) 

2nd  ser.,  Ill,  p.  99 

1629 

Sweden 

1,200  (Alexander  Hamilton),  1,200  (Sir 

2nd  ser.,  Ill, 

George  Cuninghame) 

pp.  136, 208 

1631 

Sweden 

2,000  (Sir  Donald  Mackay,  Lord  Reay) 

2nd  ser.,  IV,  p.  218 

1631 

Sweden 

6,000  (Sir  James  Hamilton,  Marquis  of 

Burnet,  p.  5*** 

Hamilton) 

1632 

Sweden 

1,400  (Sir  James  Lumsden) 

2nd  ser.,  IV,  p.  483 

1632 

Sweden 

200  (Lt  Col  McDougall) 

2nd  ser.,  IV,  p.  525 

1633 

France 

1,200  (Sir  John  Hepburn) 

2nd  ser.,  V,  p.  65 

1635 

Sweden 

60  (Thomas  Moffat) 

2nd  ser.,  VI,  p.  65 

1636 

Low  Countries 

300  (Lord  Almond) 

2nd  ser.,  VI,  p.  225 

1637 

France 

1,120  (Captain  Robert  Hume) 

2nd  ser.,  VI,  p.  401 

1637 

Sweden 

1,200  (Cuninghame,  Monro,  Stuart) 

2nd  ser.,  VI, 

pp.  458, 484 

1638 

France 

1,000  (Andrew,  Lord  Gray) 

2nd  ser.,  VII,  p.  103 

1639 

France 

2,000  (Colonel  Alexander  Erskine  of 

2nd  ser.,  VII, 

Mar) 

pp.  106, 136 

1642 

France 

6,000  (James  Campbell,  Earl  of  Irvine, 

2nd  ser.,  VII, 

and  others) 

pp.  247, 281, 302 

1656 

Sweden 

2,500  (William,  3rd  Lord  Cranstoun) 

Fischer,  p.  122** 

Notes 

*  Register  of  the  Privy  Council  of  Scotland  (1545-1689) 
**  Fischer,  The  Scots  in  Sweden 

***  Burnet,  The  Memoires  of  the  Lives  and  Actions  of  James  and  William  Dukes  of  Hamilton  and 
Castleherald  etc. 


It  can  be  argued  that  the  term  "mercenary"  is  not  appropriate  in  describing 
these  men.  The  term  current  in  Scotland  in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth 
centuries  was  the  phrase  "waged  men  of  war"  -  in  Scots,  "wageit  men  of 
weare"  or  variants  of  it.  "Mercenary"  remains,  however,  a  convenient  word 


172 


JAMES  MILLER 


to  describe  the  soldiers  who  were  fighting  for  a  commander  or  a  political 
state  other  than  that  which  from  their  place  of  birth  or  normal  residence 
could  be  deemed  their  own,  and  it  is  used  here  in  this  sense.  In  discussions 
during  the  workshops  in  the  Fighting  for  a  Living  project,  it  was  suggested 
that  a  "mercenary"  had  to  be  free  from  social  ties  or  obligations,  available 
to  be  hired,  and  with  no  stake  in  a  conflict  other  than  as  a  paid  man.  These 
conditions  do  not  apply  to  all  the  Scots  who  fought  on  the  continent  of 
Europe  and,  as  will  be  apparent  from  this  chapter,  it  was  often  social  ties 
or  obligations  that  led  to  them  being  recruited  as  soldiers  in  the  first  place. 
Often,  too,  their  stake  in  a  conflict  sprang  from  religious  leanings  or  a  sense 
of  honour;  they  were  not  always  serving  simply  for  the  money. 

The  military  roles  the  Scottish  mercenaries  played  in  the  wars  of  the 
period  lie  outside  the  scope  of  this  chapter  and  are  only  summarized  below.3 
The  focus  here  is  on  the  circumstances  or  pressures  in  Scottish  society  that 
led  so  many  to  soldier  abroad,  in  practice  to  constitute  a  form  of  migrant 
labour,  rather  than  follow  another  livelihood  at  home.  The  chapter  briefly 
describes  the  labour  conditions  they  accepted.  The  information  sources 
to  which  we  can  turn  comprise  contemporary  legal  and  administrative 
records,  letters,  and  other  documents.  Ordinary  soldiers  leave  little  trace  in 
the  records  of  the  period  and  what  does  survive  as  evidence  of  their  actions 
and  motives  is  scant  and  unevenly  spread  in  space  and  time.  Other  sources 
are  the  many  histories  of  families  and  clans:  they  were  usually  written  much 
later  than  the  events  they  describe  and  are  always  subject  to  embellishment, 
but  are  our  only  access  to  a  rich  oral  culture  and  tradition  and,  when  treated 
with  care,  can  provide  valuable  additional  detail. 

The  socio-economic  background 

Lying  on  the  periphery  of  Europe  and  having  a  relatively  poorly  developed 
economy,  Scotland  was  open  to  the  experience  of  economic  emigration,  a 
phenomenon  enhanced  during  the  years  between  1550  and  1650  by  popula- 
tion growth  and  by  frequent  seasons  of  severe  dearth  with  resulting  high 
food  prices.4  Several  attempts  have  been  made  to  estimate  the  population  of 
the  country  in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  and  they  agree  that 

3  See,  for  example,  Murdoch,  Scotland  and  the  Thirty  Years'  War;  Miller,  Swords  for  Hire. 

4  Socio-economic  conditions  are  explored  in  general  histories,  e.g.,  Smout,  A  History  of  the 
Scottish  People;  Lynch,  The  Oxford  Companion  to  Scottish  History.  David  Worthington,  British 
and  Irish  Emigrants  and  Exiles  in  Europe,  has  an  overview  of  emigration  studies. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


173 


the  total  must  have  stood  between  800,000  and  a  little  over  1  million.  The 
emigration  of  so  many  soldiers,  therefore,  represents  the  loss,  occasionally 
temporary  but  often  permanent,  of  a  substantial  proportion  of  the  country's 
able-bodied  young  men  and  immediately  provokes  the  question  of  why  it 
took  place,  when  it  might  appear  to  have  been  detrimental  to  the  country's 
own  well-being. 

The  bulk  of  the  population  was  scattered  in  rural  villages  and  town- 
ships, and  most  burghs  were  small  enough  to  ensure  almost  everyone  was 
closely  dependent  on  a  relatively  primitive  agriculture  that  was  dangerously 
susceptible  to  harvest  failure.  Time  and  again  evidence  of  distress  occurs  in 
the  historical  record,  and  we  find  repeated  attempts  by  the  authorities  to 
impose  alleviating  measures,  such  as  the  banning  or  licensing  of  the  export 
of  grain  and  livestock,  and  even  attempting  to  limit  the  number  of  dishes 
that  could  be  served  at  meals  (although  gradated  in  number  according  to 
status  so  that  a  bishop  could  have  eight,  but  a  burgess  only  three).5  On 
21  June  1572  the  Privy  Council  ordered  people  to  remove  themselves  from 
the  city  of  Edinburgh  to  stay  with  friends  in  the  country  where  they  might 
be  "best  staikit  [best  provided  for]".6  In  the  Chronicle  of  Aberdeen  for  the 
year  1578,  we  read  that  at  that  time  there  was  "a  great  dearth  of  all  kind  of 
victuals  through  all  Scotland,  that  the  like  was  not  seen  in  no  man's  day 
before.  The  meal  was  sold  for  six  s[hillings]  the  peck,  the  ale  for  tenpence 
the  pint,  the  wine  from  the  best  shipment  forty  pence  the  pint;  fish  and 
flesh  were  scant  and  dear."7 

Epidemics  of  plague  and  other  diseases  added  to  the  woes  undergone 
by  the  general  population.  The  Privy  Council  attempted  to  counter  the 
spread  of  infection  through  restrictions  on  travel  and  the  quarantining  of 
sea  travellers.  There  is  no  information  on  the  numbers  of  people  affected 
by  such  catastrophes,  but  their  seriousness  comes  over  clearly  in  what 
evidence  does  survive.  In  October  1606  the  Earl  of  Dunfermline  wrote  to 
the  king  that  "The  tounes  of  Air  and  Striveling  [Ayr  and  Stirling]  ar  almoste 
desolat";  this  outbreak  of  plague  lasted  from  1603  to  1609,  and  took  500  lives 
in  Perth  in  the  winter  of  1608-1609. 8 

For  Scots  who  were  free  to  go,  therefore,  the  incentives  to  emigrate  were 
strong.  Some  moved  to  England,  despite  long-standing  hostility  between 

5  Register  of  the  Privy  Council  of  Scotland  (7545-1689)  14  vols  (Edinburgh,  1877)  [henceforth, 
RPCS],  I,  p.  94. 

6  Ibid.,  II,  p.  148. 

7  Author's  translation  of  Scots  original;  in  "The  Chronicle  of  Aberdeen",  Miscellany  of  the 
Spalding  Club  (Aberdeen,  1842),  II,  p.  47. 

8  Letters  and  State  Papers  During  the  Reign  of  King  fames  the  Sixth,  p.  91. 


174 


JAMES  MILLER 


the  neighbouring  nations  and  the  fact  that  there  was  legislation  in  England 
targeted  against  the  Scots  as  enemy  aliens.  These  emigrants,  predominantly 
men,  practised  various  trades  and  professions  but,  unsurprisingly  in  view 
of  the  frequent  outbreaks  of  warfare  between  the  two  countries,  none  is 
listed  as  having  been  a  soldier.9  The  pathways  to  the  continent  were  also 
well  established  through  trade.  In  the  later  sixteenth  century  the  favoured 
destination  for  Scottish  emigrants  was  the  Baltic  area,  in  what  are  now 
Poland  and  its  neighbours.  Several  thousand  Scots  are  estimated  to  have 
taken  ship  for  such  ports  as  Stettin  (Szczecin)  and  Danzig  (Gdansk)  and 
then  to  have  spread  throughout  central  and  eastern  Europe.10  Many  became 
respectable  merchants,  while  others  remained  poor  itinerant  pedlars. 
Scotland  also  had  a  trading  base  in  the  town  of  Veere  at  the  mouth  of  the 
Scheldt  -  and  there  was  steady  traffic  across  the  North  Sea.  As  the  Dutch 
had  embraced  Calvinism,  a  form  of  Protestantism  shared  with  Scotland, 
it  is  easy  to  understand  why  Scots  should  be  drawn  to  this  part  of  Europe, 
where  manyjoined  the  armed  struggle  in  the  Netherlands.  When  he  wrote 
a  prospectus  in  1624  to  attract  settlers  to  the  lands  he  had  been  recently 
granted  in  maritime  Canada,  Sir  William  Alexander  observed  that  "Scotland 
by  reason  of  her  populousness  being  constrained  to  disburden  herself  (like 
the  Bees)  did  every  yeare  send  forth  swarmes,  whereof  great  numbers  did 
haunt  Pole  [Poland]  with  most  extreme  kind  of  drudgerie  (if  not  dying 
under  the  burden)  scraping  a  few  crummes  together,  til  of  late  that  they 
were  compelled,  abandoning  their  ordinary  calling,  to  betake  themselves 
to  the  warres  against  Russians,  Turks  or  Swedens."11  What  did  the  emigrants 
expect  to  find  abroad?  Overwhelmingly  they  tried  to  make  a  living  through 
some  kind  of  trade  or  mercantile  activity,  making  use  of  family  connec- 
tions to  obtain  employment  and  opportunity.  What  Sir  William  Alexander 
remarks  on  -  abandoning  trade  for  soldiering  -  was  a  response  to  economic 
misfortune  wherever  there  was  a  demand  for  men  to  fill  an  army's  ranks. 

Emigration  as  soldiers 

Men  also  emigrated  specifically  to  find  employment  as  soldiers.  The  Privy 
Council  was  aware  in  June  1573  of  "a  gude  nowmer  [good  number]  [...]  of 

9  Galloway  and  Murray,  "Scottish  Emigration  to  England  1400-1560". 

10  See,  for  example,  Fischer,  The  Scots  in  Eastern  and  Western  Prussia;  and  the  international 
conference  on  "Scotland  and  Poland,  a  Historical  Relationship,  1500-2009",  Edinburgh,  2009. 

11  "Prospectus  of  the  Colony  of  New  Scotland,  1624",  quoted  in  Davidson,  The  Davidsons,  p.  153. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


175 


this  realm"  prepared  to  go  abroad  "under  pretens  to  serve  in  the  wearis 
[wars]  in  foreyn  countries".12  The  Council  also  saw  an  opportunity  here  to 
relieve  social  pressure  at  home:  in  1572,  mindful  of  "the  present  hunger, 
derth  and  scarcitie  of  viveris  [scarcity  of  food]",  it  allowed  men  freely  to 
travel  to  the  Low  Countries  to  fight  in  the  cause  of  Dutch  independence.13 
The  licensing  of  recruitment  was  an  attempt  on  the  part  of  government 
to  control  what  was  already  happening  irrespective  of  the  wishes  of  the 
authorities  and,  perhaps  more  importantly,  counter  any  attempt  to  hide  an 
armed  conspiracy  under  the  cloak  of  recruitment  for  overseas  service.  In 
September  1587  the  Privy  Council  issued  a  proclamation  to  be  read  at  the 
market  crosses  in  all  the  main  burghs  forbidding  anyone  to  raise  "bandis 
of  men  of  weare  [bands  of  men  of  war]"  or  to  put  themselves  in  arms,  enrol 
under  any  captain,  or  go  abroad  as  a  soldier  without  royal  licence.14  It  was 
forbidden  to  attract  soldiers  away  from  royal  service  and  for  levies  to  as- 
semble within  sixteen  miles  of  the  young  James  VI's  residence  at  Stirling 
Castle.  Recruiting  captains  were  urged  to  embark  their  men  at  the  nearest 
port,  and  at  times  were  ordered  to  recruit  without  using  drums,  presumably 
for  fear  of  rousing  excitement  or  animosity  in  the  general  populace.  Coping 
with  the  unruly  behaviour  of  mobs  of  would-be  soldiers  on  their  way  to 
seaports  was  a  concern  of  the  Privy  Council  in  1605,  and  the  presence  in  the 
country  in  1609  of  two  companies  of  Irish  mercenaries  forced  by  bad  weather 
to  land  at  Peterhead  while  en  route  to  Sweden  worried  the  Council  greatly.15 
As  an  example  of  an  unofficial  levy  that  was  also  declared  illegal,  we  have 
the  episode  in  1612  when  the  Privy  Council  tried  to  prevent  recruitment 
for  service  in  the  Swedish  army  against  Denmark.  The  Council  informed 
James  VI,  now  resident  in  London  as  the  king  of  Britain,  that  men  had  been 
violently  pressed  and  taken  against  their  will.  Official  attempts  by  the  Privy 
Council  to  nip  the  levy  in  the  bud  included  searching  ships  about  to  sail, 
ordering  the  discharge  of  recruits,  and  summoning  to  its  presence  Alex- 
ander Ramsay,  the  senior  officer  (who  did  not  appear  and  was  thereafter 
denounced  as  a  rebel).16 


12  RPCS,  II,  p.  235. 

13  Ibid.,  II,  p.  148. 

14  Ibid.,  IV,  p.  211. 

15  Ibid.,  VIII,  p.  390. 

16  Ibid.,  IX,  pp.  430-461. 


176 


JAMES  MILLER 


Indigenous  military  practices 

One  factor  that  made  soldiering  a  viable  option  for  young  men  going  abroad 
and  enhanced  the  feasibility  of  recruiting  was  the  long  tradition  in  the 
country  of  armed  service.  It  was  the  custom  for  nobles  to  keep  trains  of 
armed  men.  The  traditional  view  of  Scotland  as  a  country  where,  up  until 
the  Treaty  of  Union  in  1707,  the  tension  between  the  monarch  and  the 
nobility  often  caused  the  latter  to  break  into  rebellion  or  take  up  arms  in 
pursuit  of  their  own  interests  against  either  the  crown  or  each  other  has 
been  queried  by  recent  historians,  but  it  remains  true  that  feuding,  raiding, 
and  the  signing  of  bonds  of  manrent  were  common  and  that  Scotland  was  a 
country  prone  to  the  violent  resolution  of  difference.17  Comments  from  the 
writings  of  John  Major  (or  Mair)  are  relevant  here.  "If  two  nobles  of  equal 
rank  happen  to  be  very  near  neighbours,  quarrels  and  even  shedding  of 
blood  are  a  common  thing  between  them;  and  their  very  retainers  cannot 
meet  without  strife",  he  observed  in  1521  in  his  History  of Great  Britain.  "The 
farmers  [...]  keep  a  horse  and  weapons  of  war,  and  are  ready  to  take  part 
in  [their  lord's]  quarrel,  be  it  just  or  unjust,  with  any  powerful  lord,  if  they 
only  have  a  liking  for  him,  and  with  him,  if  need  be,  to  fight  to  the  death. 
The  farmers  have  further  this  fault:  that  they  do  not  bring  up  their  sons  to 
any  handicraft.  Shoemakers,  tailors,  and  all  such  craftsmen  they  reckon  as 
contemptible  and  unfit  for  war."18  Major  was  more  critical  of  Highlanders: 
"They  are  full  of  mutual  dissensions,  and  war  rather  than  peace  is  their 
normal  condition.  The  Scottish  kings  have  with  difficulty  been  able  to 
withstand  the  inroads  of  these  men."19 

The  social  structure  of  the  country  was  complicated  by  major  cultural 
differences  between  the  various  regions,  the  most  important  being  the 
one  between  what  can  be  usefully,  though  crudely,  termed  the  Lowlands 
and  the  Highlands,  a  cultural  frontier  often  termed  the  Highland  Line. 
John  Major  was  aware  of  this  but  it  is  also  commented  upon  by  John  of 
Fordun,  a  cleric  who  wrote  what  is  regarded  as  the  first  full-scale  history 
of  Scotland  in  the  mid-fourteenth  century:  "The  people  of  the  coast  are  of 
domestic  and  civilised  habits,  trusty,  patient  and  urbane,  decent  in  their 
attire,  affable  and  peaceful,  devout  in  divine  worship,  yet  always  prone  to 
resist  a  wrong  at  the  hands  of  their  enemies.  The  highlanders  and  people  of 
the  islands,  on  the  other  hand,  are  a  savage  and  untamed  nation,  rude  and 

17  Wormald,  Lords  and  Men  in  Scotland;  Grant,  Independence  and  Nationhood. 

18  Hume  Brown,  Scotland  before  7700 from  Contemporary  Documents,  pp.  58-59. 

19  Ibid.,  p.  60. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


177 


independent,  given  to  rapine."20  Fordun's  view  was  biased,  but  the  cultural 
divide  had  become  real  by  his  lifetime.  His  "savage  and  untamed  nation" 
comprised  of  course  the  mainly  Gaelic-speaking  clan  society  that  played 
a  prominent  part  in  the  Jacobite  risings  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
centuries.  This  was  a  largely  pastoral  culture  with  a  strong  warrior  ethos, 
grouped  in  kindreds  and  adherents  holding  territories,  very  prone  to  feuding 
with  each  other  and  capable  of  moving  quickly  into  military  mode.  Within 
clan  or  kindred,  blood  relationships  were  important,  and  war  parties  of 
the  clan  were  usually  commanded  by  the  chief  himself  or  blood  relatives. 
Writing  in  1578,  Bishop  John  Leslie,  himself  Highland  born,  showed  that  this 
warrior  society  persisted  for  a  very  long  time:  "A  peculiar  and  proper  vice 
is  among  these  men,  and  to  their  well-being  most  pestilent,  that  naturally 
they  are  fond  willingly  and  vehemently,  if  their  masters  command  them, 
to  sedition  and  strife:  they  rather  be  esteemed  as  noble,  or  at  least  as  bold 
men  of  war,  than  as  labourers  of  the  ground  or  men  of  craft,  irrespective 
of  poverty  or  riches."21 

Mention  should  be  made  in  passing  of  a  special  class  of  mercenary  soldier 
that  sprang  from  the  Gaelic  Highland  world.  This  was  the  "galloglass",  a  term 
Anglicized  from  the  Gaelic  word  galloglaigh,  meaning  "foreign  warrior". 
They  were  a  restricted  class  of  professional  fighters  from  the  western  sea- 
board of  the  Highlands  who  found  service  in  the  retinues  of  Irish  chieftains 
from  the  thirteenth  century  until  the  early  1600s.  A  few  found  service  in 
Sweden  during  the  Thirty  Years  War  but,  as  a  specialized  group,  they  lie 
outside  the  main  scope  of  this  chapter.22 

In  the  south  of  Scotland,  in  the  Borders,  the  country  marking  the  frontier 
with  England,  in  the  same  period  existed  a  society  similar  to  that  of  the 
clans  in  having  a  pastoral  economy  and  a  predilection  for  raiding  and  feud- 
ing. Here  there  were  kindreds  loyal  to  particular  territory-holding  families 
who  could  switch  easily  into  military  mode.  In  Bishop  Leslie's  opinion 
in  1578,  fear  of  war  inhibited  the  cultivation  of  the  soil  among  them.  The 
similarity  between  Highlander  and  Borderer  was  recognized  at  the  time: 
"The  roll  of  the  clans  that  have  captains,  chiefs  and  chieftains  on  whom 
they  depend  often  against  the  will  of  their  landlords  on  the  Borders  as  in 
the  Highlands."23 


20  Ibid.,  p.  12. 

21  Author's  translation  of  Scots  original  from  ibid.,  pp.  165-166. 

22  A  general  introduction  can  be  found  in  Cannan,  Galloglass. 

23  Author's  translation  of  Scots  original,  RPCS,  IV,  p.  782. 


178 


JAMES  MILLER 


Between  the  Highland  and  Border  regions,  in  which  the  Scottish 
monarchy  had  a  continuous  struggle  to  maintain  some  hegemony,  lay  the 
Lowlands  where  approximately  60  per  cent,  from  the  best  estimates,  of 
the  population  lived,  in  a  society  divided  between  rural  settlements  and 
larger  burghs.  This  region  formed  a  belt  across  the  centre  of  the  country 
and  extended  up  the  east  coast  to  the  environs  of  Aberdeen  and  beyond  to 
the  Moray  Firth.  Presumably  these  were  the  people  Fordun  considered  of 
domestic  and  civilized  habit,  yet  in  his  study  of  bloodfeud  in  Scotland,  K.M. 
Brown  noted  that  40  per  cent  of  the  365  feuds  he  identified  as  occurring 
between  1573  and  1625  took  place  in  the  Lowlands  with  a  further  23  per 
cent  in  the  Borders.24 

Although  the  Highlands  and  the  Borders  had  the  potential  to  be  a 
good  recruiting  ground,  it  is  significant  that,  as  far  as  we  can  tell  from  the 
surviving  evidence,  including  the  names  of  the  men  involved,  the  bulk 
of  the  recruiting  for  overseas  service  took  place  in  the  Lowlands,  in  the 
most  settled  part  of  Scotland.  The  recruitment  of  soldiers  in  the  Highlands 
did  not  become  significant  until  quite  late  in  the  period  of  study,  when 
Mackay's  Regiment  was  raised  in  1626.  One  of  Mackay's  officers,  Robert 
Monro,  named  the  senior  Scottish  officers  in  Swedish  service  in  1632:  of  the 
thirty  colonels  in  his  list,  nine  are  known  to  have  come  from  the  Lowlands 
or  the  north-east;  another  sixteen  probably  from  the  same  regions,  judging 
by  their  surnames;  only  four  from  the  Highlands;  and  one,  the  son  of  Scots 
emigrants,  actually  from  Finland.  Of  the  fifty-two  lieutenant  colonels  in 
Monro's  list,  only  six  are  Highland,  and  five  of  these  are  from  the  Lowland- 
influenced  parts  on  the  east  coast.25 

In  his  major  work  on  the  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Netherlands,  James  Fergu- 
son provides  plenty  of  evidence  for  the  Lowland  contribution  to  this  notable 
example  of  Scottish  military  service  abroad.26  To  give  one  example,  in  a 
document  concerning  soldiers  to  be  paid  after  the  death  of  their  captain, 
Archibald  Arskin  (Erskine)  at  Zwolle  in  December  1608,  of  the  forty-one 
legible  signatures,  fifteen  are  indisputably  Scots  and  a  further  ten  could  be 
Scots,  and  the  names  suggest  a  Lowland  origin  for  all  of  them.  As  a  general 
comment,  Ferguson  says  in  his  introduction:  Forth-side  counties,  especially 
Fife,  "had  the  closest  connection  with  the  brigade,  but  Perthshire,  Forfar, 
Aberdeenshire  and  the  Highlands,  more  especially  after  General  Mackay 
[1640-1692]  entered  it,  and  other  parts  of  Scotland  had  their  representatives 

24  Brown,  Bloodfeud  in  Scotland  15/3-1625,  p.  5. 

25  Monro,  Monro  His  Expedition  with  the  Worthy  Scots  Regiment. 

26  Ferguson,  The  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Service  of  the  United  Netherlands. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


179 


under  its  colours".27  The  General  Mackay  referred  to  is  Hugh  Mackay  of 
Scourie  (c.  1640-1692),  with  no  connection  to  the  earlier  Mackay's  Regiment. 
Proximity  to  the  east-coast  ports  and  ease  of  travel  played  an  obvious  part 
in  this  preponderance  of  recruitment  in  the  Lowlands  but,  as  we  have  seen, 
the  Lowlands  were  only  relatively  more  peaceful  and  ordered  than  the 
farther-flung  Highlands. 

The  nobles  were  capable  of  laying  aside  their  own  differences,  at  least  to 
some  extent,  when  an  external  threat  appeared  -  always  from  England.  In 
February  1546,  for  example,  the  Privy  Council  called  on  two  Border  families 
-  the  Kerrs  of  Cessford  and  Ferniehurst,  and  the  Scotts  of  Branxholme  -  to 
set  aside  their  own  raids  on  each  other  "during  the  time  of  this  present  war 
between  the  realms  of  Scotland  and  England"  and  instead  seek  redress 
through  the  courts  of  law.28  The  Minute  in  the  Privy  Council  papers  gives  a 
vivid  impression  of  the  kindreds  involved  in  these  quarrels  when  it  details 
"their  kin,  friends,  men,  tenants,  adherents,  allies  and  supporters"  as  coming 
under  the  order.  Robert  I  (1274-1329)  was  able  through  violent  suppression 
of  his  enemies  to  unite  much  of  the  country  behind  him  during  the  Wars  of 
Independence.  His  army  contained  men  from  different  parts  of  the  country, 
Highland  as  well  as  Lowland  and  Border,  but  despite  such  periods  of  near 
unity  it  remained  true  for  most  of  the  Stewart  period,  from  1371  onwards, 
that  the  levying  of  troops  to  prosecute  the  many  outbreaks  of  hostilities 
with  England  was  primarily  a  Lowland  affair,  with  only  a  relatively  small 
contribution  of  men  from  the  southern  edges  of  the  Highlands  and  from  the 
Borders.  In  a  national  emergency,  though,  the  propensity  of  the  Borderers 
for  raiding  and  feuding  allowed  the  rapid  raising  of  a  skilled  and  mobile 
cavalry  force.  This  is  described  in  a  Minute  in  the  papers  of  the  Privy  Council 
in  October  1545:  it  charges  three  commissioners  with  the  raising  of  1,000 
horsemen  to  "pass  and  remain  upon  the  Borders  for  the  space  of  three 
months  for  defence  of  the  realm  against  our  old  enemy  of  England",  and 
notes  that  they  will  be  paid  from  an  allotted  sum  of  £18,000  Scots.29 

At  various  times  during  the  sixteenth  century  the  Privy  Council  ordered 
a  full  levy  of  foot  and  horse.  The  example,  noted  in  the  Register  of  the  Privy 
Council  for  21  August  1546,  to  muster  men  for  the  siege  and  capture  of  Saint 
Andrews  Castle,  divided  the  realm  into  four  parts,  which  included  the 
sweep  of  coastal  territory  up  the  east  coast  via  Aberdeen  to  the  shores  of  the 
Moray  Firth.  All  four  were  mainly  part  of  the  Lowlands  and  only  impinged 

27  Ibid.,  I,  p.  xxv. 

28  RPCS,  I,  p.  22. 

29  Ibid.,  I,  p.  16. 


180 


JAMES  MILLER 


on  the  Highlands,  although  there  were  also  at  times  Highland  elements  in 
the  assembled  army.30  Such  summonses  were  proclaimed  at  market  crosses 
in  all  the  burghs,  and  called  on  men  between  the  ages  of  sixteen  and  sixty, 
dwelling  in  the  countryside  or  in  the  towns,  to  assemble  for  military  service 
with  their  weapons  and  enough  provisions  for  twenty  days.  The  resulting 
army  was  commonly  called  the  Scottish  host.  A  significant  feature  of  the 
system  was  that  it  allowed  the  monarch  to  raise  an  army  at  minimum  cost 
to  the  usually  impoverished  royal  treasury,  as  the  men  called  on  to  fill  the 
ranks  were  unpaid. 

To  maintain  a  degree  of  preparedness  for  fighting  there  existed  a  system 
of  training  called  wappenschaws  (weapon  shows)  held  at  regular  intervals  in 
local  districts.  The  first  relevant  act,  in  1424  during  the  reign  of  James  I,  called 
on  all  men  to  begin  training  in  archery  when  they  reached  the  age  of  twelve 
years.  The  wappenschaw  acts  were  reconfirmed  and  amended  throughout  the 
following  years  and  reigns  some  fifteen  times  before  1600.  This  was  partly  to 
promote  them  when  they  had  lapsed  and  partly  to  keep  pace  with  technologi- 
cal change.  In  1456  we  come  upon  the  first  mentions  of  artillery:  "it  is  thought 
expedient  that  the  king  make  request  to  certain  of  the  great  barons  of  the  land 
that  are  of  might  to  make  carts  of  war,  and  each  of  them  to  have  two  guns, 
and  each  of  them  to  have  two  chambers  with  the  remnant  of  the  gear  that  is 
appropriate  thereto,  with  cunning  [skilled]  men  to  shoot  them.  And  if  they 
have  no  craft  in  shooting  them,  as  now,  they  may  learn  before  the  time  comes 
that  it  will  be  needful  to  have  them."31  Hand  guns  in  the  form  of  hackbuts  are 
first  mentioned  in  the  wappenschaw  legislation  in  1535.  Every  man  who  held 
land  to  the  value  of  £100  was  required  to  have  a  gun  and  people  trained  in 
its  use.  Fines  of  livestock  or  money  were  imposed  upon  defaulters  who  failed 
to  attend  wappenschaws.  Those  who  had  no  skill  for  archery  were  called  on 
to  appear  with  hand  weapons  such  as  a  spear  or  axe.  This  act  from  the  reign 
of  James  II  (1437-1460)  is  illustrative  of  the  wappenschaw  system  and  also 
reveals  why  it  may  not  always  have  been  popular  among  the  common  people. 
"It  is  decreed  and  ordained  that  wappinschawings  be  held  by  the  lords  and 
barons,  spiritual  and  temporal,  four  times  in  the  year,  and  that  football  and 
golf  be  utterly  cried  down  and  disused,  and  that  the  bow-marks  be  made  at 
each  parish  kirk,  a  pair  of  butts,  and  shooting  be  made  each  Sunday.  And  that 
each  man  shoot  six  shots  at  the  least  under  the  pain  to  be  raised  upon  them 
that  come  not;  at  the  least  2d  to  be  given  to  them  that  come  to  the  bowmark 

30  Ibid.,  I,  p.  38. 

31  Ref James  II 1456/5  in  Records  of 'the  Parliaments  of  Scotland  to  ijoj,  available  athttp://www. 
rps.ac.uk  (accessed  3  February  2011). 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650  l8l 

to  drink.  And  this  to  be  used  from  Christmas  till  Allhallowmass  after  [...] 
And  as  touching  the  football  and  the  golf  we  ordain  it  to  be  punished  by 
the  baron's  fine."32  The  ordinary  men  of  the  realm  may  have  preferred  their 
football  or  their  golf  to  spending  what  little  time  they  had  free  from  labour 
in  a  kind  of  home  guard.  Surviving  court  books  from  burghs  and  baronies 
contain  references  to  men  being  fined  for  failure  to  attend  the  wappenschaw. 
For  example,  the  Court  Book  of  the  Barony  of  Leys  in  Aberdeenshire  states, 
regarding  a  wappenschaw  held  on  24  January  1626,  that  on  the  following  day 
fourteen  men  who  had  failed  to  attend  were  fined  between  10s  and  40s  each.33 
Despite  some  resistance  to  attending  training,  by  the  time  of  the  main 
period  of  recruitment  for  armed  service  in  Europe,  there  was  a  pool  of 
manpower  with  at  least  some  basic  military  experience  on  which  to  draw. 
There  was  also  a  ready  precedent  for  sending  troops  abroad.  In  the  early 
fifteenth  century,  contingents  of  men,  several  thousand  strong,  had  been 
sent  to  France  to  fight  for  the  Dauphin  against  the  English.  Before  that 
period,  individual  knights  had  gone  abroad  from  Scotland  to  fight  in  vari- 
ous conflicts  but  this  was  the  first  time  there  was  a  deliberate  export  of 
soldiers  to  aid  a  continental  ally,  a  significant  episode  in  the  long-standing 
relationship  between  France  and  Scotland,  known  as  the  Auld  Alliance.  The 
Alliance  also  produced  the  Garde  Ecossais,  a  small  elite  unit  that  comprised 
part  of  the  French  royal  bodyguard.34  An  attempt  to  reinvigorate  this  al- 
liance in  the  mid-sixteenth  century  led  to  the  raising  of  more  troops  for 
service  in  France.  In  1552,  the  Privy  Council  ordered  commissioners  "over 
all  parts  of  the  realm"  -  though  significantly  no  commissioner  is  named  for 
the  western  Highlands  -  "to  vesy  [recruit]  the  men  of  the  shire,  including 
the  men  in  the  burghs  if  they  are  said  to  be  able  and  reliable"  to  go  to  France. 
The  same  order  included  the  raising  of  400  horsemen  in  the  Borders  and 
the  Lowlands  for  the  same  service.35 

"The  laudable  profession  of  arms" 

Against  this  sixteenth-century  background  of  economic  hardship  and 
emigration  stands  a  major  factor  in  our  study  -  the  attitude  of  the  noble 

32  Hume  Brown,  Scotland  before  7700 from  Contemporary  Documents,  p.  26. 

33  "Court  Book  of  the  Barony  of  Leys",  in  Miscellany  of  the  Spalding  Club  (Aberdeen,  1852),  V, 
p.  223. 

34  See,  for  example,  Macdougall,  "An  Antidote  to  the  English". 

35  RPCS,  I,  p.  134. 


182 


JAMES  MILLER 


and  landowning  classes  to  warfare,  an  attitude  summed  up  in  the  phrase 
coined  by  Robert  Monro  in  his  account  published  in  1637  of  his  experiences 
in  Mackay's  Regiment  in  the  Thirty  Years  War  and  used  as  a  heading  above.36 
For  this  section  of  society  being  a  soldier  was  a  natural  calling.  In  his  study 
of  this  class,  in  Noble  Society  in  Scotland,  Keith  Brown  describes  how  the 
nobility  held  a  martial  ethos  as  an  "integral  facet  of  their  identity".37  In  the 
system  of  national  defence  the  nobility  provided  the  monarch  with  his 
officer  corps  and  also,  through  their  tenants,  with  his  manpower.  In  turn  the 
non-noble  landowners,  the  lairds,  imitated  the  actions  and  shared  the  at- 
titudes of  their  social  superiors.  In  the  period  under  study,  the  revolt  against 
Spanish  hegemony  in  the  Low  Countries  and  from  1618  the  Thirty  Years 
War,  with  smaller  outbreaks  of  warfare  elsewhere  across  the  continent, 
offered  plenty  of  opportunity  for  the  members  of  these  leading  classes  to 
exercise  their  love  of  arms  and,  in  the  process,  they  hoped,  win  fortune  as 
well  as  glory.  The  temptation  was  particularly  strong  for  those  unlikely  to 
inherit  family  wealth  -  younger  sons,  illegitimate  sons  -  and  those  with 
a  military  talent  but  no  patron  to  help  them  up  the  social  ladder  at  home. 
In  his  book,  Robert  Monro  talks  of  his  comrades  as  "worthy  Cavaliers  [...] 
whereof  some  from  meane  condition  have  risen  to  supreme  honour,  wealth 
and  dignitie".38  Finding  employment  as  soldiers  on  the  continent  became 
almost  a  tradition  in  a  few  extended  families:  from  the  family  of  the  Lords 
Forbes,  three  younger  brothers,  all  sons  of  the  tenth  Lord  Forbes,  and  the 
illegitimate  son  of  one  of  these  brothers  were  killed  in  the  Thirty  Years  War.39 
It  was  also  recognized  that  military  service  abroad  could  open  the  door  to 
other  opportunities,  as  is  illustrated  by  the  Innes  family  of  Cotts  in  Aberdeen- 
shire. Alexander  Innes  of  Cotts  had  several  sons:  the  eldest  son  John  served 
in  the  French  guard  before  he  inherited  from  his  father  in  1634;  the  second 
son  Alexander  wrote  to  his  father  from  London  on  12  December  1627,  "My 
brother  Robert  is  [...]  shortly  to  return  to  Germanie.  I  assure  you  Sir  he  has 
made  ane  gaynfull  voyage.  He  hes  imployed  in  London  [2,000  merks]  whitch 
I  hope  within  half  yeir  will  be  in  returne  foure,  and  in  Germanie  he  hes  foure 
thousand  moir.  He  hes  ane  angel  in  the  day  allowance  from  the  Regiment  so 
long  as  he  is  abrod";  Robert  was  Alexander's  fifth  son  and  was  at  this  time 
a  captain  in  the  English  army  after  previously  being  in  the  French  guard.40 

36  Monro,  Monro  His  Expedition  with  the  Worthy  Scots  Regiment,  title  page. 

37  Brown,  Noble  Society  in  Scotland,  p.  3. 

38  Monro,  Monro  His  Expedition  with  the  Worthy  Scots  Regiment,  Address  to  the  reader. 

39  Tayler  and  Tayler,  The  House  of  Forbes,  p.  168. 

40  Forbes,  Ane  Account  of the  Familie  of  Innes,  p.  215. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650  183 

The  recruitment  of  soldiers 

These  sons  of  nobles  and  lairds,  who  saw  themselves  as  professional 
soldiers,  had  a  better  chance  of  finding  a  place  in  a  continental  army  if, 
especially  in  times  of  war,  they  could  arrive  with  their  own  contingent 
of  men,  already  armed  or  not.  There  was  also  the  incentive  of  benefiting 
financially  from  levying  men,  always  a  tempting  prospect  for  lairds  who 
had  landed  themselves  in  debt,  although  this  did  not  always  work  out  well. 
In  August  1661  Lord  Forbes  petitioned  Charles  II  for  payment  he  had  never 
received  for  levying  men  for  the  king  of  Denmark's  service  in  1626  as  part 
of  Mackay's  Regiment;  the  failure  to  pay  him  on  time  had  resulted  in  a 
serious  debt  burden.41  The  attractions  of  military  service  and  cash  payments 
for  recruiting  men  are  obvious  for  landowners  struggling  to  make  ends 
meet  during  years  of  climatic  difficulty,  and  would  have  been  especially 
marked  in  the  case  of  younger  or  illegitimate  sons  with  no  prospect  of  an 
inheritance.  Unfortunately  we  know  very  little  about  most  of  the  named 
military  captains  to  whom  the  Privy  Council  issued  recruitment  licences. 
Many  would  have  been  professional  soldiers  but  it  is  not  clear  how  many 
were  already  in  the  service  of  foreign  armies  and  had  returned  home  to 
levy  men. 

Alongside  the  professional  military  men  appeared  some  merchants, 
referred  to  as  enterprisers,  who  offered  to  provide  recruits  to  any  needy 
commander.  A  prominent  example  of  this  group  was  Sir  James  Spens  of 
Wormiston,  a  Fife  landowner  and  merchant  adventurer  born  in  1571.  He 
was  probably  already  trading  in  the  Baltic  area  when  he  and  his  brother 
were  approached  by  Karl  IX  of  Sweden  in  1605  to  recruit  1,600  foot  soldiers 
and  600  cavalry  for  Swedish  service  against  Poland.  This  service  was  to  be 
done  with  the  British  monarch's  permission,  and  Spens  was  to  be  paid  1,600 
daler  for  every  300  men  and  appointed  as  colonel  in  overall  command  of 
them,  presumably  ensuring  for  himself  a  regular  salary.42  The  daler,  rex- 
dollar,  or  riksdaler  was  the  Swedish  equivalent  of  the  German  reichsthaler, 
the  international  European  currency  of  the  time.  This  was  the  start  of  a 
rewarding  career  for  the  Fife  merchant:  he  went  on  to  organize  further 
troop  levies,  serve  as  an  ambassador  for  the  British  and  Swedish  monarchs, 
and  was  eventually  ennobled  as  a  Swedish  baron  before  his  death  in  1632. 


41  Tayler  and  Tayler,  The  House  of  Forbes,  p.  185. 

42  Fuller  biography  available  at  http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/ssne  (ID  1642)  (accessed 
1  February  2011). 


184 


JAMES  MILLER 


As  an  example  of  a  recruiter  who  failed  to  fulfil  the  terms  of  a  recruitment 
contract,  let  me  summarize  the  career  of  John  Gordon  of  Ardlogie.  The 
second  son  of  an  Aberdeenshire  laird,  Gordon  received  funds  to  levy  and 
transport  men  to  Germany  as  part  of  the  larger  recruitment  under  James 
Sinclair  of  Murkle  in  March  1627.  This  he  failed  to  do  and  was  outlawed  -  in 
the  Scots  legal  expression,  "put  to  the  horn".  He  evaded  arrest  and  eventu- 
ally escaped  to  Germany  where,  it  appears,  he  was  killed  in  1638  in  the 
contingents  commanded  by  fellow  Scot,  also  called  John  Gordon.43 

During  the  reign  of  Karl  IX's  son,  Gustavus  Adolphus,  contracts  for 
recruitment  were  based  on  rates  laid  down  by  the  Swedish  government.44 
A  letter  dated  21  April  1629  contains  articles  of  agreement  between  Sir  James 
Spens  and  a  Captain  Alexander  Hamilton  for  the  recruitment  of  1,200  men.45 
Hamilton  received  the  sum  of  £1,696  "lawfull  English  money"  as  equivalent 
to  7,680  riksdaler,  or  4.5  riksdaler  per  £1.  The  captain's  expenses  in  recruiting 
included  the  provision  of  food  and  drink  for  recruits,  usually  some  clothing, 
and  their  transport  costs  across  the  North  Sea,  as  well  as  a  hand-out  when 
a  man  signed  on.  In  his  study  of  recruitment  for  Sweden  in  the  1620s,  J.A. 
Fallon  calculated  that  it  cost  6s  8d  to  ship  a  man  from  Scotland  to  the  Elbe, 
and  that  two  weeks'  food  and  drink  for  a  recruit  cost  9s  4d.  This  leaves  a 
balance  of  4s,  almost  1  riksdaler,  a  sum  that  Fallon  suggested  would  have 
been  handed  to  the  newly  signed-on  recruit.46  This  seems  very  generous  and 
we  must  allow  the  possibility  that  some  of  the  money  might  have  stayed 
in  the  recruiter's  pocket,  particularly  as  a  recruiter  could  face  a  fine  if  he 
failed  to  bring  in  the  number  of  men  promised  or  required. 

Other  factors  and  motivations 

A  factor  of  some  importance  in  recruitment  in  the  1550-1650  period  was 
religion.  Solidarity  with  other  members  of  the  same  religious  denomination 
led  many  to  take  up  arms:  this  was  true  of  the  recruitment  to  fight  in  the 
1570s  in  the  Low  Countries  against  the  Habsburgs;  in  the  effort  to  restore 
Frederick  and  his  queen,  Elizabeth  Stewart,  daughter  of  James  VI,  to  the 
Rhine  Palatinate  after  1618;  and  in  the  perceived  defence  of  the  Protestant 
cause  under  Gustavus  Adolphus  of  Sweden.  The  fall  of  Haarlem  to  the  Span- 

43  Bulloch,  The  House  of  Gordon,  p.  49. 

44  Fallon,  "Scottish  Mercenaries  in  the  Service  of  Denmark  and  Sweden",  p.  43. 

45  Quoted  in  Fraser,  Memorials  of  the  Earls  of  Haddington,  p.  92. 

46  Fallon,  "Scottish  Mercenaries  in  the  Service  of  Denmark  and  Sweden",  p.  183. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


185 


ish  in  1573  aroused  an  unknown  but  sizeable  number  of  Lowland  Scots  to 
volunteer  in  the  Dutch  cause,  and  the  Privy  Council  noted  the  issue  of  a 
recruiting  licence  to  Captain  Thomas  Robesoun  to  be  in  the  "defence  of 
Goddis  trew  religioun".47 

The  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Low  Countries 

It  can  be  seen  in  Table  6.1  that  there  was  a  sizeable  movement  of  fighting 
men  from  Scotland  mainly  to  France  and  Scandinavia  in  the  mid-sixteenth 
century  This  was  followed  by  a  significant  series  of  levies  for  service  in  the 
Low  Countries  in  the  1570s  after  the  Dutch  rising  to  throw  off  Habsburg 
rule.  The  levies  began  as  the  raising  of  companies  under  individual  captains 
but  in  1586  these  companies  were  amalgamated  into  two  regiments.  The 
organization  of  the  Scots  in  Dutch  service  thereafter  went  through  a  num- 
ber of  changes  but  a  Scots  Brigade,  as  the  units  were  collectively  labelled, 
remained  a  feature  of  the  Dutch  army  until  1782.  As  already  stated,  the  units 
of  the  brigade  were  initially  recruited  mainly  in  the  Lowlands,  and  it  was 
not  until  the  mid-seventeenth  century  that  we  find  significant  recruitment 
from  the  Highlands.  In  an  age  when  sons  were  often  inclined  and  indeed 
expected  to  follow  the  same  trade  as  their  fathers,  it  is  no  surprise  to  find 
it  being  said  of  the  Scots  Brigade:  "Probably  no  military  body  ever  existed 
in  which  members  of  the  same  families  were  so  constantly  employed  for 
generations."48  The  records  of  the  Brigade  include  note  of  Dutch  authorities 
making  the  journey  across  the  North  Sea  to  seek  men,  for  example  in  1594 
when  ambassadors  crossed  from  Veere  to  Leith  on  such  an  errand,  and 
again  in  1632  when  the  States  General  sought  to  reinforce  the  existing  four 
English  and  three  Scottish  regiments  in  Dutch  service. 

Recruitment  for  service  in  the  Thirty  Years  War 

The  second  major  phase  of  recruitment  of  soldiers  for  overseas  service 
came  during  the  Thirty  Years  War.  The  early  levies  were  used  to  reinforce 
the  army  of  Count  Ernst  von  Mansfeld,  the  mercenary  commander,  in  the 
campaign  in  Bohemia  in  support  of  James  VPs  son-in-law,  Frederick  of 
Bohemia,  against  the  Holy  Roman  Empire.  Later  levies  were  also  destined  to 

47  RPCS,  II,  p.  237. 

48  Ferguson,  The  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Service  of  the  United  Netherlands,  I,  p.  xxiv. 


186 


JAMES  MILLER 


fight  in  the  effort  to  restore  Frederick  to  the  Upper  and  Lower  Palatinate  and 
to  strengthen  the  Danish  opposition  to  west-bound  Habsburg  forces,  as  well 
as  to  join  the  forces  of  Gustavus  Adolphus.  Large  levies  were  implemented 
in  the  late  1630s  and  early  1640s  for  French  service  in  the  latter  stages  of  the 
Thirty  Years  War  when  France  entered  the  war  in  alliance  with  the  Swedes 
and  others  against  the  Holy  Roman  Empire. 

Attitudes  to  military  service 

The  social  hierarchies  that  existed  in  Scotland  made  the  recruitment  of  men 
easier  than  it  might  otherwise  have  been.  In  the  rural  Highlands,  the  clan 
system  could  be  readily  adapted  to  secure  men  for  continental  levies.  In 
1633  the  parish  minister  of  Wardlaw  near  Inverness  recorded  that  Thomas 
Fraser,  son  of  a  local  laird,  used  his  clan  connections  and  the  assistance  of 
Lord  Lovat,  the  clan  chief,  to  raise  recruits.49  In  another  instance  involving 
the  Frasers,  in  1656,  clan  leaders  helped  a  recruiter  enlist  forty-three  men 
in  three  days.  It  seems  that  the  use  of  such  social  networks  was  standard 
procedure.  When  Sir  Donald  Mackay  of  Strathnaver  issued  commissions  in 
his  proposed  regiment  to  the  leading  young  men  in  neighbouring  clans,  he 
undoubtedly  expected  at  least  some  of  them  to  respond  with  enthusiasm 
and  bring  men  with  them  to  the  colours,  and  this  is  indeed  what  happened. 

In  the  Lowlands,  the  subordinate  classes  appear  not  to  have  shared 
the  attitude  to  martial  glory  found  among  the  nobles  and  lairds.  The  poor 
socio-economic  conditions  in  the  late  sixteenth  century  and  the  familiarity 
with  travel  to  the  Low  Countries  prevalent  on  the  east  coast  of  Scotland  may 
have  helped  in  the  recruitment  of  men  in  the  Lowlands  to  join  the  conflict 
in  the  Netherlands,  but  later  during  the  seventeenth  century  there  is  clear 
evidence  of  passive  and  even  active  resistance  to  recruitment.  In  April  1620, 
for  instance,  the  levy  to  provide  1,500  men  to  go  with  Colonel  Andrew  Gray 
to  Bohemia  was  proceeding  slowly,  and  towards  the  end  of  that  month  the 
Privy  Council  ordered  all  beggars,  vagabonds,  and  "masterless"  men  with 
no  lawful  trade  or  means  of  livelihood  to  enlist.  Failure  to  comply  with 
this  command  could  result  in  a  whipping  or  being  burnt  on  the  cheek  for  a 
first  offence,  and  hanging  for  a  second,  at  first  glance  a  seemingly  counter- 
productive threat.50  The  Council  also  directed  criminals  to  be  placed  in  the 
army,  and  in  the  Borders  a  proclamation  was  read  out  at  market  crosses 

49  Fraser,  Chronicles  of  the  Frasers,  pp.  255,  417. 

50  RPCS,  XII,  p.  259. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


187 


to  announce  that  reivers,  men  convicted  of  feuding  and  cattle  raiding, 
were  to  be  marked  down  for  transportation.  Early  in  May  Colonel  Gray  had 
sufficient  men  to  set  off  for  Hamburg,  but  in  the  last  days  before  sailing 
some  of  the  recruits  deserted  and  went  into  hiding  in  the  Edinburgh  area. 
From  1620  onwards  it  appears  to  have  become  common  for  courts  to  offer 
criminals  the  opportunity  to  go  abroad  in  military  service  and  for  recruiting 
officers  to  visit  jails  in  the  search  for  men. 

A  major  levy  was  launched  in  the  spring  of  1627  to  provide  men  for  the 
service  of  the  king  of  Denmark,  then  facing  the  advancing  forces  of  the  Holy 
Roman  Empire  in  north-western  Germany.  The  three  commanders  -  Robert, 
Earl  of  Nithsdale,  Alexander  Lord  Spynie,  and  James  Sinclair  of  Murkle 

-  were  each  granted  £4,000  sterling  for  the  task.  The  target  of  9,000  men 

-  3,000  each  -  was  extremely  ambitious.  Efforts  to  help  recruiters  attain 
it  included  another  pronouncement  from  the  Privy  Council  about  taking 
up  vagabonds  and  idle  men,  except  that  this  time  the  Council  went  into 
more  detail  and  mentioned  "all  Egyptians  [gypsies]"  and  fugitive  soldiers 
from  other  levies.51  The  Council  also  noted  reports  of  the  targeted  recruits 
forming  themselves  into  "societies  and  companies"  and  preparing  to  use 
firearms  to  resist  recruitment.  The  Council  warned  sheriffs  and  burgh 
magistrates  to  apprehend  all  potential  recruits  from  among  the  idle  and 
masterless  in  their  jurisdictions  and  asked  them  to  assist  the  recruiting 
officers  "in  bringing  of  these  people  to  their  colours".  Sea  captains  were 
forbidden  to  give  fugitives  passage  to  Ireland.  The  levy  proceeded  during 
the  summer  but  it  soon  brought  objections  from  respectable  sections  of 
the  community.  Recruiting  captains  were  clearly  desperate  to  fill  their 
quotas  and  were  resorting  to  dubious  tactics.  The  Council  learned  in  June 
of  men  going  into  hiding  and  deserting,  and  also  of  men  being  violently 
taken  against  their  will.52  In  July,  leading  burgesses  in  Edinburgh  protested 
that  their  sons  and  grandsons  at  the  college  were  being  induced  to  enlist 
by  "alluring  speeches",  causing  some  families  to  withdraw  their  offspring 
from  the  college  and  send  them  to  other  burghs  for  safety.53  There  were 
complaints  from  the  town  of  Burntisland  in  Fife  in  September  that  the 
soldiers  waiting  to  go  abroad  were  causing  "manie  great  disordours".54  In 
the  midst  of  this  troubled  time  around  the  Forth,  Charles  I  launched  a  new 
war  against  France  and  called  for  a  levy  for  men  for  an  expedition  to  relieve 

51  Ibid.,  2nd  series,  I,  p.  565. 

52  Ibid.,  2nd  series,  VIII,  p.  379. 

53  Ibid.,  2nd  series,  II,  p.  7. 

54  Ibid.,  2nd  series,  II,  p.  79. 


188 


JAMES  MILLER 


the  siege  of  La  Rochelle.  The  Nithsdale-Spynie-Murkle  levy  probably  raised 
only  5,000  men  by  the  time  the  contingents  sailed  for  Denmark  in  October. 
In  1629,  Murkle  was  still  trying  to  reach  his  original  target  of  3,000,  had 
exhausted  the  recruitment  grant,  and  had  "ingaged  his  awin  estait  for  the 
furtherance  thairof".55  Interestingly,  in  his  petition  to  the  Privy  Council 
describing  his  unfortunate  predicament,  Murkle  seems  most  concerned 
over  being  disgraced  in  the  eyes  of  the  king  of  Denmark  and  asks  for  a 
hearing  with  Charles  I  in  the  hope  the  British  king  will  plead  his  case  in 
Copenhagen. 

By  the  late  1620s,  therefore,  it  is  evident  that  recruiters  were  finding  it 
difficult  to  attract  sufficient  numbers  of  men  to  fulfil  their  obligations  in 
the  Lowlands,  hitherto  the  main  part  of  the  country  for  the  recruitment  of 
soldiers  for  overseas  service.  The  articles  of  agreement  for  recruitment  of 
men  for  Sweden  between  Sir  James  Spens  and  Captain  Alexander  Hamilton 
in  April  1629  refer  to  "the  scantnes  of  men  in  Scotland".56  During  this  period, 
the  Lowlands  enjoyed  improvements  in  trade  and  the  economy,  better  sea- 
sons for  agriculture,  and  fewer  outbreaks  of  infectious  disease.57  Prospects  at 
home  must  have  appeared  better  than  they  had  in  the  previous  half-century. 
It  is  only  at  this  point  that  recruitment  in  the  Highlands  becomes  significant. 
Charles  I  asked  for  200  Highland  bowmen  for  his  La  Rochelle  expedition  in 
1627  but  in  the  previous  year  Sir  Donald  Mackay  of  Strathnaver  (ennobled  as 
Lord  Reay  in  1628)  in  the  far  north  of  the  country  had  taken  it  upon  himself 
to  escape  some  domestic  difficulties  by  obtaining  from  the  king  a  licence  to 
raise  troops  for  the  continent  on  a  much  larger  scale.  Sir  Robert  Gordon,  a 
neighbouring  landlord,  and  possibly  a  cause  of  some  of  Sir  Donald's  domestic 
difficulties,  recorded  the  eventuality  as  follows: 

The  yeir  1626  Sir  Donald  Macky  (a  gentleman  of  a  sturring  spirite) 
finding  himselff  crossed  at  home,  and  matters  not  succeeding  accord- 
ing to  his  expectation,  either  in  his  owne  particular  estate  or  against 
his  neighbours  he  taks  resolution  to  leave  the  kingdome;  and  to  this 
end  he  causeth  his  freinds  to  deale  at  court  with  the  king  for  a  licence 
to  transport  men  to  the  Count  Mansfeild  into  Germanie.58 


55  Ibid.,  2nd  series,  III,  p.  147. 

56  Quoted  in  Fraser,  Memorials  of  the  Earls  of  Haddington,  p.  92. 

57  Smout,  A  History  of  the  Scottish  People,  pp.  99-103. 

58  Gordon,  A  Genealogical  History  of  the  Earldom  of  Sutherland,  p.  401. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


189 


Count  Mansfeld's  army  was  defeated  before  Mackay's  contingents  reached  it 
but  Mackay's  Regiment,  as  it  became  called,  entered  the  service  of  Denmark. 
After  the  Peace  of  Liibeck  in  July  1629,  its  officers  offered  their  allegiance  to 
Gustavus  Adolphus  of  Sweden  and  took  their  men  with  them.  In  contrast 
with  the  struggle  faced  by  Nithsdale  and  his  colleagues  to  fill  the  ranks, 
the  levy  in  the  northern  Highlands  proceeded  relatively  quickly.  Mackay 
received  his  licence  in  March  1626  and  by  October  at  least  2,000  men  were 
ready  to  embark  for  the  Elbe  estuary.59  There  were  two  possible  reasons 
for  this:  this  part  of  the  country  had  not  been  really  affected  by  previous 
recruitments,  and  it  was  a  reflection  of  the  ease  with  which  clan  society 
could  be  mobilized.  Mackay  was  ably  assisted  in  recruitment  by  the  Forbes 
family  in  Aberdeenshire,  where  a  proportion  of  the  recruits  were  raised.60 
Despite  the  relative  speediness  of  the  levy,  Mackay's  recruitment  drive 
suffered,  probably  like  all  levies,  from  desertion,  from  men  enrolling, 
receiving  the  initial  payment,  and  then  going  into  hiding.  According  to 
the  Privy  Council,  "a  grite  number  of  thame"  did  this,  and  severe  punish- 
ment was  proclaimed  for  them  and  any  who  helped  them  evade  justice.61 
In  the  long  run,  even  the  clan  system  came  under  stress  and  did  not  always 
produce  recruits:  in  September  1636  Captain  Robert  Innes,  a  laird's  son 
from  Mackay's  Regiment,  was  angered  enough  to  strike  tenants  of  Gordon 
of  Dunkinty  near  Elgin  when  they  refused  to  allow  their  sons  or  servants 
to  be  recruited.  Efforts  to  find  new  recruits  by  Mackay  himself  in  1629  also 
had  some  trouble  in  finding  men,  partly  a  reflection  of  the  low  population 
density  of  the  northern  Highlands.  Possibly  to  avoid  stirring  up  public  unrest 
over  continual  recruitment,  when  the  Privy  Council  granted  a  licence  to 
raise  300  men  as  replacements  for  regiments  already  in  Swedish  service,  it 
added  the  instruction  that  this  was  to  be  done  quietly,  without  drums  or 
display  of  colours.62 

In  July  and  August  1632,  the  Dutch  States  General  sought  to  recruit  2,000 
men  in  England  and  1,500  men  in  Scotland  to  reinforce  existing  regiments.63 
Charles  I  gave  his  permission  readily  enough  to  the  Dutch  ambassador 
and  his  colleagues  but  warned  them  that  the  conditions  on  offer  -  each 
recruiting  officer  to  receive  8  guilders  per  man  and  the  command  of  a 
company  -  would  attract  no  one.  Various  reasons  were  put  forward  -  that  it 

59  RPCS,  2nd  series,  I,  pp.  244-245. 

60  Tayler  and  Tayler,  House  of  Forbes,  p.  177. 

61  RPCS,  2nd  series,  I,  p.  311. 

62  Ibid.,  2nd  series,  II,  p.  397. 

63  Ferguson,  The  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Service  of  Denmark  andSweden,  I,  p.  411. 


190 


JAMES  MILLER 


was  the  wrong  time  of  year,  as  high  wages  were  on  offer  during  the  harvest; 
that  recruiting  was  going  ahead  daily  for  Sweden  and  Muscovy  the  latter 
offering  15  guilders  per  short  month  to  the  soldiers;  that  the  targets  per 
recruiting  officer  were  too  high;  that  officers  would  not  like  to  recruit  men 
and  then  not  be  put  in  command  over  them;  that  money  was  still  owing  to 
the  Earl  of  Morton  for  a  previous  levy  in  1629.  These  excuses  were  advanced 
in  England;  the  ambassador  failed  to  contact  anyone  in  Scotland  to  find 
out  if  there  was  a  better  chance  of  success  there.  The  levy  failed.  In  1633  the 
English  government  prohibited  taking  men  out  of  the  country  for  foreign 
service  unless  they  were  recruits  to  keep  existing  regiments  up  to  strength. 

The  large  levy  in  1642  for  service  in  France  also  ran  into  difficulties, 
producing  in  the  Privy  Council  records  of  the  by-now  familiar  resorts  to 
impressing  "idle  persons"  and  handing  over  convicted  criminals  to  the 
recruiters.  The  Council  records  also  show,  however,  that  the  authorities 
were  not  undiscriminating:  for  example,  when  eleven  men  complained 
that  they  had  been  taken  by  force  and  thrown  into  prison  "where  they  are 
yitt  lying  almost  starving  for  want  of  maintenance  and  their  wyves  and 
children  ar  begging  through  the  countrie",  the  Council  sent  officials  to 
investigate  with  the  result  that  five  were  set  free  and  six  were  retained, 
the  latter  having  been  deemed  to  have  freely  volunteered.64  There  are  also 
instances  of  landowners  seeking  the  release  of  members  of  their  workforce 
who  had  either  volunteered  or  been  inveigled  into  enlisting,  an  interesting 
point  to  which  I  shall  return  below. 

Conditions  of  service 

No  written  agreements  or  contracts  covering  the  recruitment  of  the  rank- 
and-file  soldiers  have  been  located  during  the  research  for  this  chapter,  and 
it  is  possible  they  were  rarely  if  at  all  used.  Verbal  agreements  founded  on 
the  existing  conditions  of  trust  and  hierarchy  could  be  expected  in  clan 
societies  with  their  strong  oral  cultures,  but  they  were  also  probably  the 
norm  in  other  parts  of  the  country.  The  correspondence  and  contracts  that 
do  survive  relate  to  official  sources  and  educated  elites. 

The  soldier  serving  abroad  could  usually  hope  for  regular  pay  and  the 
provision  of  food  and  clothing.  These  conditions  appear  to  have  been  ac- 
cepted at  the  time  as  reasonably  fair,  although  it  is  difficult  to  compare 
wages  and  prices  in  the  various  currencies  of  the  day.  Complaints  and 

64  RPCS,  2nd  series,  VII,  p.  450. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


191 


dissension,  amounting  at  times  to  mutiny,  seem  to  have  occurred  only  when 
pay  and  provisions  were  not  issued  when  expected.  In  the  late  sixteenth 
century  in  Scotland,  in  one  year  a  male  farm  servant  could  expect  to  earn 
from  £1 6s  8d  to  £6,  depending  on  skill  and  experience  as  well  as  regional 
variations.  Rural  wages  were  often  supplemented  with  accommodation  and 
some  food  but  they  seem  very  low  when  compared  to  what  soldiers  could 
hope  for.  The  pay  scale  set  by  the  Privy  Council  in  1586  for  armed  men  to 
police  the  Borders  ran  from  £20  a  month  for  a  horseman  and  £6  for  a  foot 
soldier  to  almost  £70  and  £50  respectively  for  their  commanding  captains.65 

As  an  example  of  pay  given  to  Scottish  soldiers  in  Dutch  service  in  the 
1570s,  we  have  in  the  records  totals  paid  out  to  commanding  officers  for  the 
fourteen  months  between  ljune  1573  and  31  July  1574.  The  largest  sum  went 
to  Captain  Baulfour  (Balfour)  -  £8,015,  the  smallest  to  Colonel  Ormeston 
-  £50,  with  widely  varying  amounts  to  other  officers,  which  presumably 
reflect  the  respective  lengths  of  service  and  complements  of  men,  as  well 
as  the  costs  of  bringing  recruits  over  the  North  Sea.66  At  the  same  time, 
under  "pay",  Colonel  Ormeston  received  £500,  and  this  seems  to  have  been 
the  going  annual  rate  for  a  man  of  this  rank.  In  October  1575,  the  salary  of 
Henry  Balfour,  by  this  time  a  colonel,  was  set  at  800  guilders  per  year  by 
the  Dutch  authorities.  In  May  1577,  Colonel  Balfour  received  £6,000  Artois 
for  his  services,  as  a  lump  sum  at  the  termination  of  his  period  of  service; 
he  was  soon  requested  to  return  to  the  Low  Countries  when  war  broke  out 
anew  in  October  that  year. 

In  1577  the  Dutch  laid  down  that  "All  captains  [are]  to  pay  their  men  45 
stivers  each,  half  monthly,  while  the  engagement  remains  at  1,100  guilders 
monthly  for  100  men."67  A  village  worker's  salary  in  the  Low  Countries  at 
the  time  was  around  200  guilders  per  year.68  In  1579,  the  pay  scale  for  a 
company  of  soldiers  under  the  command  of  a  Colonel  William  Stewart  ran 
from  12  livres  per  month  for  the  drummer,  the  lowest  paid,  through  16  for  a 
corporal,  24  for  a  sergeant,  40  for  an  ensign,  and  45  for  a  lieutenant,  to  90  for 
the  captain.69  In  September  1586  the  authorities  in  Amsterdam  were  asked 
to  pay  to  150  Scottish  soldiers  who  had  newly  arrived  in  the  area  1  florin 
(1  guilder)  per  day  to  the  captain,  10  patars  (14  pence)  to  the  lieutenant,  6 
patars  each  to  the  ensigns,  sergeants,  cadets,  corporals,  and  clerk,  and  3 

65  Ibid.,  IV,  p.  111. 

66  Ferguson,  The  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Service  of  Denmark  and  Sweden,  I,  p.  36. 

67  Ibid. 

68  Israel,  The  Dutch  Republic,  p.  353. 

69  Ferguson,  The  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Service  of  Denmark  and  Sweden,  I,  p.  20. 


192 


JAMES  MILLER 


patars  to  the  ordinary  ranks.70  The  request  to  Henry  Balfour  to  return  to 
fight  for  the  States  General  in  the  renewal  of  hostilities  in  October  1577 
included  the  remuneration  (apparently  per  year)  offered  to  him  and  his 
men:  £500  for  himself,  £200  for  his  lieutenant,  £100  for  his  sergeant  major, 
£40  for  the  quartermaster  and  the  provost,  £16  for  the  halbardiers,  and  £12 
for  the  provost  sergeants.71 

An  attractive  feature  of  service  in  the  Low  Countries  in  the  Dutch  cause 
was  that  the  widows  and  children  of  officers  killed  in  action  were  given 
state  pensions,  amounts  varying  from  800  guilders  per  year  awarded  to  the 
widow  and  son  of  Colonel  Balfour  in  April  1581,  to  sums  in  1610  of  the  order 
of  £50  to  £100  for  each  surviving  relative.72 

Costs  forced  the  States  General  government  of  the  United  Provinces  in 
the  Low  Countries  to  review  the  pay  scales  in  1587,  when  they  dismissed 
companies  they  could  not  afford,  asked  officers  against  assurance  of  a 
final  settlement  in  the  future  not  to  seek  payment  for  arrears  as  long  as 
the  war  continued,  required  soldiers  to  swear  to  accept  a  48-day  month 
(officers  were  given  a  32-day  month),  and  assigned  garrisons  to  different 
provinces  according  to  the  province's  ability  to  pay 73  The  commission  dated 
26  June  1588  to  Colonel  Bartholomew  Balfour  included  the  statement  that 
his  company  of  200  men  would  receive  "2,200  pounds,  of  40  groats  the 
pound,  every  32  days,  with  the  reservation  that  henceforward  he  shall 
content  himself  with  these  payments  every  48  days.  With  this  he  and  his 
subordinate  officers  and  his  soldiers,  like  others  in  the  country's  service, 
must  content  themselves."74  A  similar  commission,  dated  15  April  1593,  to 
Captain  Patrick  Bruce  commanding  a  company  of  lancers  of  100  horses 
provides  higher  remuneration  for  mounted  men  -  "his  payment  to  be  3,000 
pounds  per  month  of  32  days,  the  officers'  salaries  and  horse  fodder  included 
therein,  provided  he  shall  take  care  to  procure  [...]  all  such  payments  out  of 
said  levies  on  the  country  districts  of  Flanders,  the  which  he  is  to  exact  with 
all  diligence  and  put  in  train,  so  that  his  pay  beyond  the  present  incomes 
can  be  escheat  (or  claimed)  out  of  them;  and  he,  the  captain,  his  subordinate 
officers,  and  cavalry  shall  like  others  rest  satisfied  with  receiving  a  month's 
pay  every  48  days."75 

70  Ibid.,  I,  p.  77. 

71  RPCS,  II,  p.  641. 

72  Ferguson,  The  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Service  of  Denmark  and  Sweden,  I,  p.  226. 

73  Grimeston,  A  Generall  Historie  of  the  Netherlands,  p.  890. 

74  Ferguson,  The  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Service  of  Denmark  and  Sweden,  I,  p.  85. 

75  Ibid.,  I,  p.  92. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


193 


The  imposition  of  32-day  and  48-day  months  was  not  popular  with  the 
Scottish  officers.  In  June  1588,  three  captains,  named  as  Meurrey,  Nysbeth, 
and  Waddel,  told  a  committee  of  the  States  General  that  they  were  willing  to 
serve  "but  that  they  must  have  the  means  to  make  their  soldiers  willing  and 
to  satisfy  them".76  There  ensued  a  round  of  negotiations  that  lasted  several 
weeks,  in  which  Colonel  Balfour  tried  to  win  the  best  deal  for  his  men  but 
which  ended  with  the  discharge  of  some  officers  and  the  continuation  of 
the  48-day  month. 

The  pay  scale  for  men  to  be  recruited  for  Swedish  service  by  Sir  Donald 
Mackay  is  set  out  in  a  letter  of  June  1629:77  colonel  -  300  riksdaler  Swedish 
per  month  of  31  days;  company  captain  - 100;  lieutenant  and  ensign  -  50; 
sergeant  -  16;  drummer  or  piper  -  8;  ordinary  pikeman  or  musketeer  -  6; 
scout  and  reserve  -  5.  The  letter  also  sets  out  what  would  be  expected  of 
the  mercenary: 

[Officers  and  men]  participating  in  our  adventures,  shall  not  turn 
away  from  us  in  times  of  misfortunes,  and  as  becometh  such  honour- 
able and  brave  cavaliers  and  soldiers,  they  shall  always  be  ready 
cheerfully  and  indefatigably  to  venture  body  and  life. 

There  follows  a  list  of  the  types  of  action  in  which  the  mercenary  may 
expect  to  find  himself-  battles,  skirmishes,  watches,  attacks,  sieges,  by  day 
or  night,  on  water  or  on  land.  The  Swedish  king  undertook  to  provide  a  suf- 
ficient monthly  allowance  with  a  twice-yearly  settlement  of  accounts.  Pay 
would  not  be  reduced  but  there  would  be  deductions  for  careless  damage 
or  breakage.  The  rate  of  exchange  at  the  time  is  revealed  in  the  articles  of 
an  agreement  drawn  up  between  Sir  James  Spens  and  Alexander  Hamilton 
in  April  1629  for  the  raising  of  1,200  men,  as  mentioned  earlier.  The  rewards 
for  senior  officers  could  be  very  high  and  come  in  the  form  of  grants  of  land 
and  hereditary  titles  among  the  nobility  as  well  as  in  payments  of  money, 
although  only  a  few  men  benefited  in  this  way. 

For  most  soldiers  the  regularity  with  which  they  received  their  pay, 
food,  and  clothing  was  a  major  factor  in  keeping  up  their  morale,  and  the 
reputations  of  commanders  often  rested  on  their  performance  in  this  regard. 
On  long  campaigns  across  great  distances,  the  systems  of  victualling  and 
payment  could  easily  break  down,  and  even  Gustavus  Adolphus,  generally 
a  reliable  payer,  had  to  deal  with  threats  of  mutiny  from  time  to  time.  Some 

76  Ibid.,  I,  p.98. 

77  Fischer,  The  Scots  in  Germany,  p.  280. 


194 


JAMES  MILLER 


mercenary  commanders  made  no  special  arrangements  for  the  support  of 
their  men  and  expected  them  to  forage  and  plunder,  practices  that  naturally 
visited  misery  on  civilians  and  brought  the  reputation  of  the  soldier  to  the 
level  of  the  thief  or  rapist. 

By  the  standards  of  the  time,  the  Dutch  were  good  at  maintaining  regular 
payment  of  salaries,  although,  as  we  have  seen,  there  were  still  occasions 
when  the  soldiers  were  stirred  to  complain.  The  conscientious  paymaster 
was  always  aware  that  the  loyalty  of  a  mercenary  could  be  severely  tested 
by  a  breakdown  in  pay,  an  eventuality  that  could  easily  occur  when  an 
army  was  in  the  field.  The  provision  of  clothing  appears  to  have  been  very 
important  for  the  attraction  of  recruits  and  the  morale  of  the  newly  formed 
contingents.  In  1627  Lord  Ogilvie  noted  that  his  recruits  would  not  "imbark 
with  good  will  except  they  get  thair  clothes"  and  realized  how  important 
this  was:  "it  does  mutch  good,  and  incurages  many,  quhen  they  sie  the 
soldieris  weill  used,  and  speciall  quhen  they  sie  them  passe  throch  the 
cuntrey  weill  apperelled".78  Robert  Monro  records  that  the  men  in  Mackay's 
Regiment  were  issued  with  clothing  and  muster  money  after  they  had  ar- 
rived in  Holstein  from  Scotland  to  join  the  king  of  Denmark's  forces,  and 
briefly  described  how  the  officers  refused  to  wear  the  Danish  cross  with 
their  Scottish  colours,  a  short-lived  instance  of  ethnic  loyalty  that  was 
dispelled  when  Kingjames  VI's  officials  told  them  to  obey  who  was  paying 
them  "in  a  matter  so  indifferent".79  After  six  months  of  training  and  what 
Monro  describes  as  getting  in  good  order,  the  regiment  was  inspected  by  the 
king,  took  an  oath  of  fidelity  and  heard  the  articles  of  war  read,  completing 
a  comparatively  well-organized  and  measured  initiation  that  may  have 
been  far  from  typical  of  the  mercenary  experience. 

Mention  of  duration  of  service  seems  to  be  missing  from  what  we  know 
of  the  contractual  arrangements  for  the  rank  and  file.  It  seems  to  have  been 
customary  for  a  soldier  to  serve  as  long  as  he  was  fit  and  the  continuation 
of  hostilities  required  his  presence,  his  time  ending  when  successful  peace 
negotiations  brought  about  disbandment. 

Conditions  of  service  related  mainly  to  the  active  soldier.  As  mentioned, 
the  States  General  in  the  Low  Countries  provided  pensions  for  the  widows 
and  offspring  of  officers  but  this  was  not  true  of  every  employer.  The 
conditions  offered  by  Gustavus  Adolphus  to  Sir  Donald  Mackay  included 
provision  for  the  care  of  wounded  and  disabled  men:  "we  shall  provide  a 
temporary  home  for  them  in  our  own  dominions,  but  should  they  prefer 

78  Fallon,  "Scottish  Mercenaries",  p.  159. 

79  Monro,  Monro  His  Expedition  with  the  Worthy  Scots  Regiment,  p.  2. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


195 


going  beyond  our  kingdom  a  month's  pay  shall  be  given  to  each".80  Evidence 
is  very  hard  to  obtain  as  to  what  really  happened  to  the  ordinary  soldier  in 
the  ranks  when  he  became  too  old  to  continue  or  had  to  retire  from  active 
duty  through  injury.  A  few  seem  to  have  found  a  role  behind  the  lines  as 
cooks  or  orderlies;  many  may  have  been  forced  to  resort  to  begging  or  a 
scrape-by  existence  in  some  menial  occupation.  We  know  from  anecdotal 
evidence  -  the  mention  of  veterans  in  later  contexts  -  that  some  of  the  Scots 
found  their  way  home  from  mainland  Europe,  likely  taking  advantage  of  the 
Swedish  offer  of  a  month's  pay  but  no  figures  on  this  are  readily  available. 
On  his  return  to  Britain  in  1633,  Robert  Monro  launched  a  venture  to  provide 
a  hospital  for  wounded  veterans.81 

The  response  of  the  enlisted  man  to  the  conditions  of  service  seems  to 
have  been  generally  one  of  acceptance,  unsurprising  in  view  of  the  options 
open  to  them  once  they  had  enlisted.  The  soldiers  keenly  perceived  unfair- 
ness in  treatment.  Sir  Donald  Mackay  sought  more  money  from  the  Danish 
authorities  for  his  men  when  they  protested  that  English  units  in  the  same 
army  were  being  paid  in  a  different  manner.  As  Robert  Monro  put  it  -  "It  is 
a  hard  matter  when  the  diligent  and  industrious  Souldier  is  disappointed  of 
his  hire,  and  that  he  is  rewarded  with  injury  who  did  merit  better."82  Diligent 
officers  in  the  field  during  the  Thirty  Years  War  were  often  exercised  in 
maintaining  the  payment  and  hence  the  morale  of  their  units. 

At  the  last  resort,  the  aggrieved  soldier  could  always  withdraw  his 
service.  A  simple  refusal  to  obey  orders  and  mutiny,  although  this  was  an 
ultimately  disastrous  step,  was  made  easier  in  the  period  under  study  by 
the  accepted  custom  that  defeated  troops  could  switch  sides  and  join  the 
army  of  the  victor.  With  the  mercenary,  loyalty  was  usually  to  comrade 
and  commander  rather  than  to  country.  Of  his  service  with  the  Swedish 
army  in  northern  Germany  in  the  1630s,  James  Turner  commented  in  his 
memoirs:  "I  had  swallowed  without  chewing,  in  Germanie,  a  very  dangerous 
maxime,  which  militarie  men  there  too  much  follow;  which  was,  that  so 
we  serve  our  master  honestlie,  it  is  no  matter  what  master  we  serve."83  In 
the  1570S-1580S  in  the  Low  Countries,  when  sieges  of  towns  were  common, 
a  besieged  garrison  whose  pay  had  fallen  into  arrears  was  often  open  to 
negotiation  and  surrender. 


80  Fischer,  The  Scots  in  Germany,  p.  281. 

81  RPCS,  2nd  series,  V,  p.  353. 

82  Monro,  Monro  His  Expedition  with  the  Worthy  Scots  Regiment,  p.  196. 

83  Turner,  Memoirs  of  His  Own  Life  and  Times,  p.  14. 


196 


JAMES  MILLER 


Back  home 

One  of  the  most  difficult  aspects  of  this  subject  to  explore  is  the  effects  mer- 
cenary service  had  on  the  society  from  which  the  soldiers  came.  Although 
the  removal  of  a  significant  number  of  active  men  from  the  population 
must  have  had  some  consequences,  there  seems  to  be  a  complete  lack  of 
evidence  for  a  shortage  of  manpower  in  normal  homeland  socio-economic 
life.  In  times  of  dearth  such  a  shortage  may  have  been  a  blessing  but  this 
would  have  been  a  short-term  benefit.  The  loss  of  manpower  may  well  have 
been  one  reason  for  increasing  resistance  to  recruitment  and  may  have 
contributed,  for  example,  to  the  Aberdeenshire  laird's  tenants  resisting  the 
efforts  of  Robert  Innes  of  Cotts  to  recruit  their  sons  and  servants. 

In  1635,  the  Privy  Council  became  so  concerned  over  the  amount  of 
foreign  "dollars  [sic]"  in  circulation  in  the  country,  leading  to  fraud  and  a 
devaluation  of  the  currency,  that  they  passed  in  August  an  act  allowing 
traders  to  use  only  domestic  money  for  transactions  and  followed  this  in 
February  1636  with  an  act  prohibiting  the  importation  of  amounts  greater 
than  56s.84  The  continental  currency  could  well  have  been  brought  by 
returning  veterans. 

By  1650  there  must  have  accumulated  in  Scotland  a  pool  of  men  with 
military  experience,  men  who  had  served  abroad  and  found  their  way  home 
again.  At  least,  this  seems  to  be  implied  by  the  petition  in  November  1641 
by  Alexander  Lord  Forbes  to  the  London  Parliament  stating  "there  are 
many  soldiers  desirous  of  employment  [...]  Your  Petitioner  having  formerly 
engaged  in  foreign  wars  desires  that  he  may  have  leave  to  entreat  such  of 
the  officers  and  soldiers  as  shall  not  be  any  longer  employed  here  and  will 
willingly  put  themselves  under  his  command  in  the  service  of  any  foreign 
prince."85 

Events  within  Britain  were  soon  to  provide  plenty  of  opportunity  for  the 
man  with  military  training.  Growing  political  tension  in  Scotland  led  to 
the  military  confrontation  of  the  First  Bishops'  War  in  June  1639.  This  was 
followed  by  further  hostilities  in  1640  and  a  gradual  worsening  of  affairs 
until  full-scale  civil  war  broke  out  in  England  in  1642.  Many  of  the  Scottish 
mercenaries  found  their  way  home  from  the  continent  to  fight,  where  their 
experience  served  them  well.  After  the  mid-century,  although  individual 
soldiers  and  officers  still  found  places  in  continental  armies,  the  raising 
of  troops  on  any  scale  for  the  service  of  foreign  powers  became  a  memory. 

84  RPCS,  2nd  series,  VI,  p.  xvii. 

85  Tayler  and  Tayler,  House  of  Forbes,  p.  195. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


197 


Military  service  in  transition 

In  the  first  part  of  this  chapter,  I  put  forward  a  number  of  factors  as  deter- 
mining the  movement  of  mercenary  soldiers  from  Scotland  to  continental 
Europe  between  1550  and  1650.  These  factors  are:  a  tradition  of  emigration 
in  general,  and  previous  experience  of  armed  service  in  continental  Europe, 
especially  in  France;  socio-economic  hardship  at  home;  domestic  military 
custom;  the  attitudes  of  the  leading  members  of  society  to  a  military  life; 
and  new  opportunities  for  armed  service  in  continental  Europe  after  the 
Reformation.  This  expansion  of  military  service  abroad  as  a  feature  of 
Scottish  society  can  be  seen  in  labour  terms  as  the  response  to  a  growth 
in  demand  for  a  particular  skill  in  a  population  where  other  opportunities 
for  making  a  living  were  constrained  in  several  ways. 

Men  with  basic  fighting  skills  and  experience  in  handling  weapons  could 
be  found  throughout  the  country.  In  the  Borders  and  the  Highlands,  cattle 
reiving  and  clan  feuds  provided  experience  in  campaigning  over  rough 
country,  but  even  in  the  more  settled  Lowland  areas  the  nobles  maintained 
bands  of  armed  men  in  their  own  service;  among  the  mass  of  peasants  and 
townsmen  the  wappenschaw  system  ensured  that  experience  in  handling 
weapons  was  normal.  The  custom  of  raising  a  host  or  army  whenever  an 
armed  force  was  needed  for  national  defence  or  security  also  kept  alive  the 
practices  of  military  service. 

Economic  hardship  at  home,  experience  with  weapons  and  armed  ser- 
vice, and  existing  emigration  pathways  to  the  continent  were  three  strong 
"push"  factors  in  encouraging  men  to  look  abroad.  This  was  combined  with 
a  strong  "pull"  factor,  the  attitude  of  the  nobility  and  the  landowning  classes 
to  military  service  and  their  enthusiasm  for  "seeking  fortune  in  the  field". 
Recruitment  for  overseas  service  was  also  encouraged  from  time  to  time  by 
government  for  several  reasons:  as  a  way  of  coping  with  food  shortages,  as  a 
way  to  get  rid  of  social  undesirables,  and  as  an  instrument  of  foreign  policy. 
When  mercenary  activity  by  Scots  may  have  had  a  negative  effect  on  foreign 
relations,  the  government  took  steps  to  curtail  or  prevent  it,  for  example, 
by  issuing  recruiting  licences  or,  in  the  case  of  the  Ramsay  recruitment  in 
1612,  by  seeking  to  suppress  it  completely. 

It  is  also  useful  to  see  the  phenomenon  in  terms  of  the  work  options  that 
were  open  to  a  young  man  at  the  time.  There  was  a  high  degree  of  hereditary 
employment,  with  the  son  of  the  merchant,  tradesman,  or  labourer  generally 
following  in  his  father's  footsteps  to  earn  a  livelihood.  This  did  not  militate 
against  some  upward  mobility  but  the  absence  of  widespread,  accessible 
education  meant  that  only  a  few  young  people  were  given  the  opportunity 


198 


JAMES  MILLER 


to  attend  any  classes  and  benefit  from  formal  tuition  outside  the  family. 
Talented  youngsters  were  probably  spotted  and  encouraged,  especially  after 
the  Reformation  when  a  great  need  for  new  clergy  arose,  but  this  route  of 
advancement  lay  open  only  to  a  relative  few.  Among  the  landowning  classes, 
only  the  eldest  son  could  hope  to  inherit  an  estate.  Military  service  of  some 
kind  became,  therefore,  a  real  career  option  for  many  young  men,  especially 
when,  as  Major  commented,  a  positive  attitude  to  military  service  existed 
among  farmers  who  scorned  trades.  To  an  extent,  rural  men  shared  the 
outlook  of  their  social  superiors  and  may  have  enlisted  willingly,  an  attitude 
most  likely  to  be  prevalent  in  clan  society  and  to  have  been  an  important 
factor  in  the  comparatively  rapid  recruitment  of  Mackay's  Regiment  in  1626. 

It  is  possible  that  some  labourers,  urban  as  well  as  rural,  saw  enlisting 
as  a  soldier  as  a  means  of  escape  from  the  restricted  life  on  offer  at  home 
and  surrendered  to  the  lure  of  adventure  in  preference  to  tedium  and 
familiarity.  For  those  who  were  fugitives  from  justice,  answering  the  call 
of  the  recruiting  officer  was  an  obvious  way  to  evade  arrest  and  a  grim 
fate,  and  was  probably  a  gamble  worth  taking,  but  even  for  men  who  had 
committed  no  wrong  the  prospect  of  soldiering  may  have  been  seen  as  an 
opportunity.  The  General  Assembly  of  the  Church  of  Scotland  that  came 
into  existence  with  the  Reformation  after  1560  spoke  against  the  oppression 
of  poor  tenants,  although  it  failed  to  do  much  to  ease  their  plight.86  In  the 
burghs  only  merchants  and  craftsmen  enjoyed  the  privileges  that  came 
with  burgess  status;  all  the  other  inhabitants,  the  majority  that  included 
servants,  journeymen,  labourers,  and  the  poor,  were  called  "unfree"  and 
had  no  say  in  local  affairs.  As  the  seventeenth  century  wore  on,  conditions 
almost  akin  to  serfdom  were  imposed  on  the  labour  force  in  the  small  coal- 
mining and  salt-panning  industries  around  the  Firth  of  Forth.87  Exchanging 
the  constraints  of  civilian  life  in  such  circumstances  for  the  discipline  of 
an  army,  which  at  least  offered  the  prospect  of  regular  food,  shelter,  and 
comradeship,  may  have  been  a  relatively  easy  decision  to  make.  When  some 
masters  complained  that  their  servants  had  been  seized  by  recruiters  and 
sought  to  have  them  released,  the  servants  may  not  always  have  been  so 
keen  to  return  to  civilian  servitude.  It  seems  that  enlisting  did  not  neces- 
sarily take  the  soldier  away  from  some  kind  of  family  life,  as  in  July  1581  the 
Privy  Council  complained  that  the  women  following  the  troops  abroad  were 


86  Smout,  A  History  of  the  Scottish  People,  p.  85. 

87  Ibid.,  p.  168. 


THE  SCOTTISH  MERCENARY  AS  A  MIGRANT  LABOURER  IN  EUROPE,  1550-1650 


199 


bringing  dishonour  on  the  country  and  called  on  ship  captains  to  allow  only 
legitimate  wives  of  good  repute  to  embark  with  the  soldiers.88 

Determining  where  the  Scottish  mercenary  contingents  fall  on  the 
axis  of  free/  unfree  labour  must  take  account  of  the  clear  distinctions 
between  officers  and  men  in  the  conditions  of  service.  Officers  were  seen 
as  professionals  and  were  free  to  resign  a  commission,  the  most  famous 
and  exceptional  example  of  this  being  the  resignation  of  Sir  John  Hepburn 
from  the  Swedish  army  in  1632  after  a  perceived  insult  and  a  quarrel  with 
Gustavus  Adolphus.89  Sir  John  was,  of  course,  a  senior  commander;  a  more 
junior  officer  may  not  have  felt  so  free  to  take  such  an  independent  course. 
The  rank  and  file  were  unfree  in  the  sense  that  they  were  expected  to  stay 
in  service  once  enlisted,  and  were  subject  to  laws  on  desertion. 

With  regard  to  the  classification  of  labour  relations  used  by  the  IISH,  the 
Scottish  mercenary  soldier  appears  to  accord  with  more  than  one  category, 
depending  on  his  individual  status.  The  conscripted  and  pressed  men  in  the 
contingents  recruited  in  the  Lowlands  fit  the  definition  of  forced  tributary 
labour.  As  well  as  receiving  pay,  they  were  paid  partly  in  kind  with  food  and 
clothing.  With  recruits  who  volunteered,  the  definition  of  labour  relations 
becomes  a  little  more  complicated.  In  effect  they  were  exchanging  one  form 
of  labour  relationship  for  another.  For  those  who  belonged  to  the  "unfree" 
section  of  society,  willingly  leaving  self-employment  as  a  tradesman  or 
employment  as  a  labourer  to  become  a  soldier  was  surrendering  a  degree 
of  personal  independence  for  indentured  tributary  labour,  but  in  times  of 
economic  hardship  the  gains  could  well  have  been  seen  as  outweighing 
the  drawbacks.  Some  volunteers  from  the  burgess  or  landowner  classes 
exchanged  a  non-working  status  for  soldiering.  An  example  here  is  James 
Turner  who,  in  his  own  memoir,  describes  how  as  a  student,  aged  eighteen, 
studying  history  and  religious  philosophy,  he  responded  to  "a  restless  desire 
[...]  to  be,  if  not  an  actor,  at  least  a  spectator  of  these  warrs  which  at  that 
time  made  so  much  noyse",  and  enlisted  in  Sir  James  Lumsden's  regiment 
bound  for  Rostock  in  1632.90  Robert  Monro,  the  laird  of  Foulis  in  Easter  Ross, 
volunteered  to  join  Mackay's  Regiment  to  escape  from  domestic  difficulties: 
deep  in  debt,  he  engaged  his  estate  revenues  to  his  creditors  for  ten  years 
and  went  off  to  be  a  military  officer.91 


88  RPCS,  III,  p.  399. 

89  Grant,  Memoirs  and  Adventures  of  Sir John  Hepburn,  p.  182. 

90  Turner,  Memoirs  of  His  Own  Life  and  Times,  p.  3. 

91  Monro,  Monro  His  Expedition  with  the  Worthy  Scots  Regiment,  p.  3. 


200 


JAMES  MILLER 


The  professional  soldier,  and  in  the  context  of  this  study,  this  usually 
means  someone  of  officer  rank,  was  much  more  a  self-employed  individual 
free  to  accept  a  commission  and,  as  circumstances  permitted,  move  from  one 
employer  to  another.  With  their  enlistment  in  the  military  ranks,  mercenar- 
ies from  the  Highlands,  where  clan  society  prevailed,  and  from  among  the 
Borders  kindreds  can  be  seen  as  moving  from  a  status  of  reciprocal  labour, 
whether  household-  or  community-based,  or  tributary  labour  to  indentured 
employment.  In  the  case  of  Mackay's  Regiment,  one  can  argue  that  Sir  Don- 
ald Mackay  saw  the  possibility  of  exploiting  clan  ties  to  find  an  honourable 
way  out  of  personal  constraints  at  home,  taking  it  on  himself  to  "offer"  men, 
for  whom  he  was  their  natural  leader,  to  the  service  of  others.  In  doing  so, 
he  was  pioneering  the  exploitation  of  the  clan  system  that  the  British  state 
deployed  from  the  latter  half  of  the  eighteenth  century  to  furnish  its  army 
with  men.  The  Scottish  host,  as  raised  by  the  government  for  a  national  cause, 
and  expected  to  serve  without  pay  for  a  fixed  number  of  days,  was  a  form  of 
tributary  serf  labour,  a  development  from  the  feudal  hosts  of  past  centuries. 

Scottish  mercenaries,  therefore,  came  from  a  variety  of  backgrounds 
to  reach  the  status  of  paid  soldier,  transitions  driven  in  the  period  under 
study,  as  we  have  seen,  by  a  growth  in  overseas  demand  for  soldiers  against 
a  background  of  socio-economic  hardship  at  home,  with  ideological  fac- 
tors, principally  motivations  arising  from  the  post-Reformation  hostility 
between  Protestant  and  Catholic,  playing  a  subsidiary  part.  The  period 
saw  the  transformation  of  the  men  who  in  an  earlier  generation  would 
have  comprised  the  post-feudal  forces  of  the  Scottish  host  and  the  armed 
followers  of  regional  and  clan  leaders  into  the  elements  of  an  aggregate 
contract  army.  Some  of  those  who  survived  the  fighting  in  Europe  and 
returned  to  Scotland  then  became  members  of  armies  commissioned  by 
the  contesting  forces  in  the  civil  wars  in  the  British  Isles,  armies  which  were 
soon  to  be  transformed  once  again  into  the  forces  of  the  state  and  the  early 
modern  conscript  army.  In  this  context,  it  is  significant  that  a  connecting 
thread  can  be  traced  from  Sir  John  Hepburn's  recruitment  for  France  in  1633 
and  the  British  line  regiment,  the  Royal  Regiment  of  Foot,  more  popularly 
known  as  the  Royal  Scots,  that  was  designated  in  1684. 


Change  and  continuity  in  mercenary 
armies:  Central  Europe,  1650-1750 

Michael  Sikora 


The  second  half  of  the  seventeenth  century  saw  significant  changes  in  the 
structures  of  the  most  important  military  organizations  on  the  European 
continent.  Collectively,  these  changes  are  commonly  labelled  as  the  intro- 
duction of  standing  armies.  These  changes  certainly  had  a  deep  impact  on 
the  terms  as  well  as  the  conditions  of  military  labour.  However,  it  needs  to  be 
discussed  whether  these  developments  should  be  understood  as  a  categori- 
cal transformation,  putting  military  labour  in  a  typological  framework  of 
its  own,  or  whether  it  would  be  more  appropriate  to  stress  the  aspects  of 
continuity  and  to  embed  these  aspects  of  change  in  a  more  evolutionary 
interpretative  framework.  This  chapter  will  argue  that  several  changes  of 
particular  importance  altered  the  face  of  military  labour  so  that  it  hardly 
could  be  equated  with  the  classical  era  of  mercenaries  in  the  sixteenth 
and  early  seventeenth  centuries.  Nevertheless,  the  components  were  still 
tied  to  various  traditions  and  did  not  constitute  a  completely  innovative 
system  that  could  be  compared  with  the  later  transformations  initiated  by 
the  French  Revolution  -  though  even  the  revolutionaries,  of  course,  could 
not  avoid  being  based  on  existing  forms  of  military  institutions. 

In  accordance  with  the  objectives  of  the  Fighting  for  a  Living  project, 
this  chapter  will  initially  outline  the  current  state  of  research.  Particular 
attention  will  be  given  to  the  modes  of  recruitment,  which  not  only  can  be 
considered  crucial  criteria  for  categorizing  the  type  of  military  labour  but 
which  also  developed  significant  variations  during  the  era  under  discussion 
here.  The  second  part  of  the  chapter  will  discuss  and  reassess  the  empirical 
findings  in  the  framework  of  some  more  general  categories  related  to  the 
typology  and  dynamics  of  military  labour. 

The  most  obvious  expression  of  these  changes  was  not  inevitably  con- 
nected with  the  principles  of  standing  armies  and  consisted  simply  of 
significant  growth  in  the  size  of  many  armies.  At  the  forefront  of  these 
developments  was  the  French  army,  which  established  new  levels  for  the 
military  strength  of  a  leading  power  within  the  European  concert.  Some 
figures  will  illustrate  the  extent  of  growth.  Of  course,  it  is  impossible  to 
determine  exact  numbers;  due  to  the  lack  of  sources  as  well  as  discrepan- 
cies between  normative  prescriptions,  a  limited  range  of  records,  and  the 


202 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


presumed  reality,  the  numbers  are  the  result  of  more  or  less  rough  estimates 
and  ongoing  discussions.  Therefore  they  cannot  offer  more  than  an  impres- 
sion of  the  quantitative  aspect  of  armies. 

During  the  Thirty  Years  War,  France  may  have  mobilized  at  the  most 
around  125,000  troops,  desperately  exploiting  all  resources.  Several  decades 
later,  around  1695,  the  strength  of  the  French  army  may  have  peaked  at 
close  to  340,000  troops.1  A  comparison  of  peacetime  statistics  is  no  less 
informative.  At  the  beginning  of  the  seventeenth  century  the  French  king 
was  already  keeping  a  few  thousand  men  under  arms.  However,  around 
1680  -  admittedly  only  in  a  short  peacetime  interlude  in  France's  struggle 
for  hegemony  -  the  army  probably  consisted  of  around  150,000  soldiers, 
significantly  more  than  during  the  Thirty  Years  War  only  four  decades 
before. 

These  numbers  certainly  give  some  impression  of  the  strength  of  the 
most  powerful  army  during  this  period.  However,  during  the  eighteenth 
century,  one  may  say  that  obtaining  or  retaining  the  status  of  a  leading 
power  required  the  maintenance  of  more  than  100,000  soldiers  in  peacetime 
and  the  mobilization  of  at  least  150,000  soldiers  during  war.  Such  were  the 
levels  of  mobilization  attained  by  the  rulers  of  Austria2  and  Prussia3  during 
the  Silesian  Wars  in  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century,  representing 
a  significant  augmentation  of  their  strength  compared  to  the  first  half 
of  the  seventeenth  century.  Though  the  figures  still  oscillated  within  a 
certain  range  and  tended  to  grow,  these  benchmarks  were  not  exceeded 
significantly  until  the  levee  en  masse  of  the  French  Revolution  marked 
another  quantum  increase  in  levels  of  mobilization. 

To  get  an  idea  of  the  overall  level  of  military  mobilization  in  central  Eu- 
rope, one  would  have  to  include  the  forces  of  several  medium-sized  powers, 
including  the  Netherlands4  and  some  Italian  states,  as  well  as  some  princely 


1  Lynn,  Giant  of  the  Grand  Steele,  pp.  41-58,  includes  some  critical  reflections  on  the  relation- 
ship between  the  numbers  derived  from  several  archived  lists  and  the  real  strength  of  the 
armies  in  the  field.  The  precision  of  the  methodology  employed  should  cause  some  concern 
about  comparing  these  numbers  with  other,  less  carefully  derived  figures. 

2  See  Hochedlinger,  Austria's  Wars  of  Emergence  7683-rygy,  pp.  98-104,  234-237,  297-303. 

3  Probably  the  most  reliable  data  can  be  found  injany,  Geschichte  der  Koniglich  Preufiischen 
Armee  bis  zum fahr  7807, I,  pp.  8,  76,  83ff,  195-196,  387,  III,  pp.  12-13,  i6off.,  186 ff,  37off,  435ff. 

4  Van  Nimwegen,  The  Dutch  Army  and  the  Military  Revolutions;  for  a  very  basic  overview, 
including  some  overall  figures,  see  van  Nimwegen,  "The  Transformation  of  Army  Organisation 
in  Early-Modern  Western  Europe",  pp.  172-178. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750 


203 


territories  within  the  Holy  Roman  Empire,5  such  as  Bavaria,  Hesse-Cassel,6 
or  Saxony.7  However,  the  relationship  between  the  strength  of  the  army  and 
the  total  population  (the  so-called  military  participation  ratio)  also  varied 
markedly.  France  benefited  from  the  extent  of  its  territories  and  the  size 
of  its  population,  which  resulted,  according  to  estimations  of  the  time,  in  a 
ratio  of  the  army's  strength  in  relation  to  the  whole  population  of  around  1 
to  140.  In  contrast,  Prussian  military  strength  was  based  on  a  territory  not 
half  as  big  as  France  with  an  even  smaller  population  density,  so  that  the 
ratio  was  around  1  to  32.  In  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century  even 
this  was  exceeded  by  the  military  of  Hesse-Cassel,  reaching  a  ratio  of  1 
soldier  to  15  civilians.8  Of  course,  these  figures  are  hard  to  verify9  and  raise 
some  difficulties  of  interpretation,  which  cannot  be  fully  investigated  here. 

Observations:  recruitment 

As  a  result  of  these  developments  the  demand  for  recruits  increased  dra- 
matically. Indeed,  the  growth  in  absolute  numbers  was  exacerbated  by  the 
continuous  need  for  replacements  in  order  to  maintain  the  permanent  exist- 
ence of  the  armies.  To  be  sure,  the  need  for  fresh  recruits  was  unceasing,  but 
reached  significant  peaks  when  rulers  decided  to  start  a  military  build-up, 
when  new  troops  were  raised  in  anticipation  of  a  military  confrontation 
or,  even  worse,  when  during  war  the  losses  had  to  be  replaced  as  quickly 


5  Numbers  can  be  found  in  Wilson,  German  Armies;  mostly,  however,  they  do  not  relate  to 
general  strengths  but  to  wartime  strength  of  territorial  contingents  deployed  as  auxiliaries  or 
parts  of  the  composite  Reichsarmee.  It  is  noteworthy  that  even  some  of  the  rather  autonomous 
imperial  cities  maintained  their  own  military,  which  will  not  be  included  here,  due  to  their 
small  numbers  and  special  circumstances;  see  Schwark,  Lubecks  Stadtmititdr  im  77.  unci  78. 
Jahrhundert;  Kraus,  Das  Militdrwesen  der  Reichsstadt  Augsburg;  Ehlers,  Die  Wehrverfassung 
der  Stadt  Hamburg  im  77.  und  7 8.  Jahrhundert. 

6  Ingrao,  The  Hessian  Mercenary  State;  see  Taylor,  Indentured  to  Liberty;  for  a  recent  overview, 
though  focused  on  early  seventeenth-century  militia,  but  with  far-reaching  considerations,  see 
Graf  "Landesdefension  oder'Fundamentalmilitarisierung'?" 

7  Kroll,  Soldaten  im  78.  Jahrhundert  zwischen  Friedensalltag  und  Kriegserfahrung;  for  a 
compilation  of  several  older  figures  on  the  Saxon  army,  see  pp.  70-73. 

8  Ingrao,  The  Hessian  Mercenary  State,  pp.  132-135. 

9  The  numbers  are  based  on  a  list  from  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century,  which  can  be  found 
injohann  Georg  Kriinitz,  Oeconomische Encyclopaedic,  L  (Berlin,  1790)  (http://www.kruenitzi. 
uni-trier.de/),  pp.  746-755;  the  list,  as  part  of  the  entry  "Kriegs-Heer",  covers  all  of  Europe, 
including  a  large  number  of  territories  of  the  Holy  Roman  Empire,  and  relates  numbers  of  army 
strength  to  the  population. 


204 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


as  possible.  Therefore  the  business  of  recruitment  met  challenges  of  a  new 
dimension,  too.  In  fact,  methods  of  recruitment  changed  significantly. 

The  most  important  mode  of  recruitment  remained  voluntary  enlist- 
ment. This  had  been  a  well-established  practice  since  mercenary  service 
had  become  dominant  in  the  later  Middle  Ages  and  had  marginalized  the 
feudal  military  service  of  the  nobility.10  A  significant  aspect  of  this  prac- 
tice had  been  the  fact  that  it  did  not  really  matter  where  the  mercenaries 
came  from.  At  one  time,  in  the  first  half  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  most 
reputable  soldiers  originated  in  Switzerland11  or,  in  the  case  of  the  so-called 
Landsknechte,  from  the  south-western  region  of  the  Holy  Roman  Empire.12 
Other  mercenaries,  such  as  the  Irish13  and  the  Scots,14  came  from  peripheral 
regions  of  Europe,  while  still  other  elements  of  the  armies,  even  in  the 
sixteenth  and  early  seventeenth  centuries,  were  also  recruited  either  in  the 
ruler's  territories  or  simply  around  the  theatre  of  war.  Such  a  composition 
gave  parts  of  the  armies  a  significant  multi-cultural  appearance. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  growth  of  the  armies  and,  probably  even  more 
importantly,  their  enduring  institutionalization  in  peacetime  implied  a 
stronger  focus  on  the  state's  own  population.  While  precise  comparisons 
are  difficult  to  determine  and  have  to  take  account  of  differing  local 
circumstances,  the  importance  of  foreign  recruits  seemingly  decreased 
in  armies  such  as  the  French15  or  the  Austrian,16  where  they  dropped  as  a 
proportion  of  the  total  to  below  20  per  cent.  Recruiting  beyond  the  state's 
borders,  however,  continued  to  be  a  common  practice.  In  this  respect, 
France  maintained  a  special  relationship  with  the  Swiss  cantons  by  extend- 
ing traditional  treaties  that  provided  fixed  numbers  of  Swiss  recruits  for 

10  Mallett,  Mercenaries  and  Their  Masters;  Redlich,  The  German  Military  Enterpriser  and  His 
Work  Force. 

11  However,  exclusive  contracts  mostly  tied  Swiss  recruitment  to  French  service;  see  as  an 
overview  Bodin,  Les  Suisses  au  service  de  la  France.  Swiss  research  on  mercenary  services  is 
mostly  focused  on  its  social  impact  in  Switzerland  itself;  see  several  contributions  in  Fuhrer  et 
at,  Schweizer  in  "Fremden  Diesnten",  though  it  mostly  refers  to  older  works,  and  Gente ferocis- 
sima;  Kiing,  Glanz  und  Elend  der  Sbldner;  Biihrer,  Der  Ziircher  Solddienst  des  78.  Jahrhunderts; 
Schaufelberger,  "Von  der  Kriegsgeschichte  zur  Militargeschichte";  Schaufelberger,  Der  alte 
Schweizer  und  sein  Krieg.  Many  authors  also  still  refer  to  Peyer,  "Die  wirtschaftliche  Bedeutung 
der  fremden  Dienste  fur  die  Schweiz". 

12  Baumann,  Landsknechte. 

13  Stradling,  The  Spanish  Monarchy  and  Irish  Mercenaries;  Murtagh,  "Irish  Soldiers  Abroad, 
1600-1800";  O'Reilly,  "The  Irish  Mercenary  Tradition  in  the  1600s". 

14  Miller,  Swords  for  Hire;  several  contributions  inMurdoch,  Scotland  and  the  Thirty  Years  War. 

15  Corvisier,  L'armeefrangaise  de  la  fin  du  XVIIe  siecle  au  ministere  de  Choiseul,  I,  pp.  55,  i57f; 
Lynn,  Giant  of  the  Grand  Siecle,  pp.  33if. 

16  Duffy,  The  Army  of  Maria  Theresa,  p.  47. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  205 

the  French  army,  hired  by  the  local  authorities  in  Switzerland  themselves. 
The  Swiss  were  organized  in  separate  units,  which  were  retained  during  the 
entire  eighteenth  century,  and  they  remained  loyal  until  the  last  ones  were 
massacred  defending  the  French  king  against  the  Parisian  revolutionaries 
in  front  of  the  Tuileries  on  10  August  1792. 

Even  the  individual  enlistment  of  foreigners  remained  possible  in  the 
French  army.  The  Austrian  army  profited  from  some  scattered  Habsburg 
possessions  in  southern  Germany  where  recruiters  had  easy  access  to  minor 
territories  in  the  region.17  Along  with  Switzerland,  the  highly  fragmented 
political  landscape  in  southern  Germany  had  provided  one  of  Europe's  most 
important  soldier-markets  since  the  heyday  of  the  Landsknechte.  This  was 
even  more  important  for  Prussia  when  it  entered  the  league  of  Europe's  lead- 
ing powers  in  the  first  half  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Due  to  its  relatively 
small  population,  the  Prussian  military  build-up  depended  to  a  considerable 
extent  on  foreign  recruitment.18  The  proportion  of  recruits  from  beyond  the 
borders  of  Prussia  may  have  accounted  for  around  one-third  of  the  army, 
and  Frederick  the  Great  even  tried  to  increase  their  numbers.19  Although  the 
standing  armies  tended  to  become  more  homogeneous  than  before  -  further 
evidence  for  this  will  be  discussed  below  -  and  since  different  armies  had 
to  deal  with  different  conditions,  recruitment  continued  to  disregard  the 
origins  of  the  recruits.  The  concern  with  the  quantity  of  recruits  overrode 
any  other  considerations. 

This  was  all  the  more  true  since  growing  armies  altered  the  conditions 
of  recruitment  in  another  important  regard.  As  far  as  we  know,  recruit- 
ment did  not  meet  serious  problems  during  the  heyday  of  mercenaries  in 
the  sixteenth  century.20  Things  changed  during  the  seventeenth  century, 
starting  with  the  Thirty  Years  War,  and  these  were  later  enforced  by  the 

17  A  very  close-up  and  colourful  view  of  the  everyday  business  of  foreign  recruitment  in  a 
southern  German  imperial  city  is  offered  by  Schiissler,  "Das  Werbewesen  in  der  Reichsstadt 
Heilbronn";  unfortunately  only  very  few  carbon  copies  of  this  work  exist.  The  subject  is  cov- 
ered fundamentally  by  Wilson,  "The  Politics  of  Military  Recruitment  in  Eighteenth-Century 
Germany".  See  also,  from  a  more  juridical  perspective,  von  Rosenberg,  Soldatenwerbung  unci 
militdrisches  Durchzugsrecht  im  Zeitalter  des  Absotutismusdor  concrete  examples,  see  pp.  i04ff, 
i34ff;  Heuel,  Werbungen  in  der  Reichsstadt  Koln  7700-7750. 

18  Gugger,  Preujiische  Werbungen  in  der  Eidgenossenschaft  im  78.  Jahrhundert;  Sicken,  "Die 
preuKische  Werbung  in  Franken";  Jany,  Geschichte  der  Koniglich  Preufiischen  Armee  bis  zum 
Jahr  7807;  von  Schultz,  Die  preufiischen  Werbungen  unter  Friedrich  Wilhelm  I.  undFriedrich  dem 
Grofien. 

19  Jany,  Geschichte  der  Koniglich  Preufiischen  Armee  bis  zum  Jahr  7807,  II,  pp.  236ff,  III,  pp.  50, 
i84ff.,  435f- 

20  Burschel,  Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschland  des  76.  und77.  Jahrhunderts,  pp.  97f. 


206 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


changes  outlined  above.  Obviously,  it  became  more  and  more  difficult 
to  motivate  enough  volunteers  to  join  the  army;  at  least,  historians  have 
revealed  an  increasing  number  of  complaints  about  recruitment  abuses  in 
the  records.21  In  fact,  recruitment  involving  the  use  or  threat  of  violence, 
or  the  condemnation  of  delinquents  to  military  service,  seemed  to  become 
characteristic  of  this  period  of  military  history. 

Some  corrections  or  nuancing  of  this  image  are  certainly  necessary.  First 
of  all,  one  has  to  consider  a  certain  bias  inherent  within  the  primary  sources. 
While  abuses  were  very  likely  to  initiate  resistance  and  formal  complaints, 
and  therefore  the  production  of  archival  sources,  a  routine  performed 
without  opposition  tends  to  be  invisible  to  the  historian.  Accordingly,  it 
is  impossible  to  obtain  a  definitive  record  of  the  relative  proportions  of 
voluntary  and  enforced  enlistment.22  Certainly  the  assumption  that  armies 
worked  with  large  percentages  of  forced  recruits  seems  to  be  unrealistic, 
though  one  should  not  underestimate  either  the  impact  of  military  disci- 
pline even  on  forced  soldiers,  which  will  be  discussed  below,  nor  the  range 
of  possible  motivations  for  truly  voluntary  enlistments. 

Secondly,  involuntary  enlistment  took  very  different  forms.  Of  course,  a 
large  number  of  examples  of  forced  recruitment  exist.  For  example,  many 
of  them  concern  Prussian  recruitment  in  the  duchy  of  Mecklenburg  in 
the  first  half  of  the  eighteenth  century.23  Obviously  the  Prussian  military 
profited  from  internal  struggles  in  the  duchy  and  from  its  defencelessness 
against  its  already  rather  powerful  neighbour.  Typically,  however,  most  of 
these  examples  took  place  during  the  period  in  which  the  Prussian  king, 
Frederick  William  I,  the  so-called  Soldatenkdnig,  implemented  a  strong 
military  build-up  by  doubling  the  number  of  Prussian  soldiers,  so  these  ex- 
amples cannot  be  considered  representative  of  the  usual  practice  of  Prussian 
recruitment  in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries  without  broader 

21  See  Sikora,  Disziplin  unci  Desertion,  pp.  221-226;  Burschel,  Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschland 
desi6.  undij.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  104-108;  Redlich,  The  German  MUitary  Enterpriser  and  His  Work 
Force,  II,  pp.  173-181;  von  Schultz,  Die  preujiischen  Werbungen  unter  Friedrich  Wilhelm  I.  und 
Friedrich  dem  Grojien.  For  a  collection  of  abstracts  from  Westphalian  sources  on  Prussian 
recruitment,  including  documents  on  the  Mdrkischen  Aufstand,  a  local  uprising  against  forced 
recruitment  in  1720,  see  Kloosterhuis,  Bauern,  Burger  und  Soldaten,  I,  pp.  23-46. 

22  See  Prove,  Stehendes  Heer  und  stadtische  Gesellschaft  imiS.Jahrhundert,  pp.  42f;  in  addition 
to  some  reports  on  recruitment  abuses,  Prove  offers  data  for  one  regiment,  comparing  the 
number  of  recruits  during  two  peacetime  decades  with  the  number  of  official  complaints  in 
the  local  records,  which  suggests  a  ratio  of  only  5  per  cent  of  irregular  recruitments;  of  course, 
the  example  is  small  and  the  number  of  complaints  might  not  be  complete. 

23  See  von  Schultz,  Die  preujiischen  Werbungen  unter  Friedrich  Wilhetml.  und  Friedrich  dem 
Grojien. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  207 

research.  The  same  thing  seems  to  be  true  for  the  use  of  military  service 
as  a  means  of  social  discipline  by  forcing  vagrants  and  delinquents  into 
the  army.  Although  there  were  examples  for  this  in  continental  armies,24 
and  although  such  examples  severely  damaged  the  image  of  the  military 
in  public  discourse,  these  practices  did  not  contribute  significantly  to 
recruitment  overall. 

On  the  other  hand,  involuntary  enlistment  did  not  always  involve  the 
use  of  violence.  It  seems  to  have  been  far  more  widespread  for  young  men 
to  be  lured  into  military  service  by  tricks  and  traps.25  For  example,  some 
signed  up  in  taverns  after  being  plied  with  alcohol;  others  were  dazzled  by 
unfulfilled  promises  or  high,  one-off  payments  for  enlistment;  while  yet 
others  accepted  gifts  only  to  be  told  subsequently  that  these  represented  a 
signing-on  fee  and  that  they  were  now  enlisted.  Moreover,  even  when  there 
was  no  trickery  involved,  we  should  recognize  that  many  men  probably  went 
into  the  army  because  of  poverty  or  to  escape  some  acute  economic  crisis.26 
Although  volunteers  in  a  formal  sense,  they  did  not  join  the  military  with 
real  enthusiasm.  Therefore,  even  considering  that  forcible  impressment 
probably  did  not  represent  the  norm,  non-violent  enlistments  should  not 
automatically  be  regarded  as  being  wholly  unforced.  In  any  event,  the  great 
efforts  made  by  governments  to  recruit  soldiers  and  the  undeniable  abuses 
that  this  involved  underline  the  fact  that  the  growth  of  military  organiza- 
tions strained  the  reservoir  of  potential  recruits  and  pushed  the  traditional 
methods  of  recruitment  to  their  limits. 

In  response,  rulers  tried  to  expand  or  to  develop  alternative  ways  of 
recruiting.  The  options,  however,  were  rather  limited,  too.  Leading  powers 
with  large  resources  at  their  disposal  could  participate  in  what  was  later 


24  See  Kroll,  Soldaten  im  7&.]ahrhundertzwischenFriedensalltag  undKriegserfahrung,  pp.  95-98; 
Burschel,  Soldner  im Nordwestdeutschland des  76.  undij.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  94f.  Sikora,  Disziplin 
und  Desertion,  pp.  229-232,  also  refers  to  some  critics  of  the  time,  who  were  worried  about  the  bad 
influence  of  such  recruits  on  discipline  and  the  reputation  of  the  military.  For  some  reflections 
on  the  juridical  debate,  see  Fichte,  Die  Begriindung  des  Militardienstverhaltnisses,  pp.  129-135. 
In  a  literal  sense,  defectors  from  the  opposing  army  were  considered  offenders,  too,  but  their 
incorporation  into  one's  own  army  was  quite  a  common  practice. 

25  Sikora,  Disziplin  und  Desertion,  pp.  226f;  Burschel,  Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschland  des  76. 
und7j.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  65,  losff;  for  these  practices  as  a  subject  of  popular  literature,  see  the 
anonymous  booki/sf-  und  lustige  Begebenheiten  deren  Herren  Cfficiers  aufWerbungen. 

26  Kroll,  Soldaten  im  78.Jahrhundertzwischen  Friedensalltag  undKriegserfahrung,  pp.  92, 164, 
Prove,  StehendesHeerundstddtische  Gesellschaft im78.Jahrhundert,  p.  37,  and  Burschel,  Soldner 
im  Nordwestdeutschland  des  76.  und  7j.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  54-87,  all  discuss  the  high  proportion 
of  recruits  from  the  lower  classes  of  the  population,  notjust  in  the  eighteenth  century. 


208 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


called  the  soldier-trade.27  Britain  was  the  most  important  client,  but  France 
and  others  also  took  part  in  this  practice.  In  short,  minor  princes,  mostly 
from  the  Holy  Roman  Empire,  provided  troops  in  exchange  for  money 
or  so-called  subsidies.  This  practice  gained  a  bad  reputation  in  the  late 
eighteenth  century  when  German  princes  abandoned  their  subjects  to  an 
uncertain  fate  by  sending  them  overseas,  seemingly  motivated  by  financial 
interests  alone.  It  attracted  even  more  criticism  as  such  soldiers,  perceived 
as  victims  of  tyrannical  arbitrariness,  were  engaged  to  fight  in  the  American 
Revolution. 

In  fact,  this  way  of  increasing  military  power  was  already  widespread 
in  the  seventeenth  century.  From  a  more  formal  view,  such  treaties  can 
be  considered  a  sort  of  alliance  between  rather  unequal  partners.  While 
from  the  perspective  of  the  major  power,  the  business  of  recruitment  could 
in  a  way  be  farmed  out,  the  minor  partner  could  hope  to  defend  its  own 
interests  by  gaining  the  support  of  a  major  player.  In  the  late  seventeenth 
century  even  Prussia,  not  yet  a  major  player,  transferred  its  own  troops  to 
foreign  command  in  exchange  for  subsidies.28  The  impressive  enlargement 
of  the  Prussian  army  under  Frederick  William  I  was  mostly  motivated  by 
experiences  of  dependency  and  unfulfilled  promises. 

In  the  context  of  the  subject  to  be  discussed  here,  the  so-called  soldier- 
trade  further  developed  pre-existing  mechanisms  for  foreign  recruitment, 
but  exacerbated  the  need  for  recruits  on  the  part  of  the  contractor.  Even  for 
the  client  it  did  not  offer  a  principal  solution  since  this  option  could  only 
be  used  for  a  certain  time,  usually  in  case  of  crisis  or  war.  Typically  it  was 
more  attractive  for  Britain  than  for  the  continental  states  because  these 
troops  could  not  contribute  to  the  permanent  strength  of  a  standing  army. 
Thus,  the  soldier-trade  did  not  constitute  a  new  principle  of  recruitment: 
it  merely  exported  the  problems  inherent  within  the  existing  system  by 
outsourcing  them  to  others. 

The  only  human  resource  rulers  could  unquestionably  mobilize  came  from 
the  population  of  their  own  territories.  Intensifying  recruitment  therefore 
inevitably  focused  on  the  domestic  population  and  accordingly  contributed 
to  the  increasingly  homogeneous  composition  of  armies.  In  general,  mobiliza- 
tion of  the  domestic  population  was  undertaken  in  two  ways.  One  approach 

27  See,  for  this  and  the  following  paragraph,  a  recent  summary  and  discussion  of  a  long 
debate,  with  much  further  reading,  Wilson,  "The  German  'Soldier  Trade'  of  the  Seventeenth 
and  Eighteenth  Centuries";  the  most  recent  contribution,  focusing  on  the  everyday  life  of  hired 
soldiers,  is  Huck,  Soldaten  gegen  Nordamerika. 

28  Seejany,  Geschichte  der Koniglich  Preufiischen  Armee  bis  zumjahr  7807, 1,  pp.  388ff. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  209 

was  to  involve  local  authorities  in  the  struggle  for  voluntary  enlistments, 
either  by  supporting  the  recruiting  officers  or  by  obliging  the  authorities  to 
deliver  recruits  themselves.*9  Experiences  with  this  option  seem  to  have  been 
variable.  When  required  to  meet  target  numbers  of  recruits,  civil  officials 
tended  to  avoid  confrontations  with  the  local  elites  by  focusing  on  vagrants, 
delinquents,  or  any  outsiders  regardless  of  their  physical  condition.  However, 
it  did  not  necessarily  provide  the  military  with  capable  soldiers;  this  could 
generally  be  better  achieved  by  leaving  recruitment  in  the  hands  of  those 
officers  who  would  have  to  deal  with  the  recruits  afterwards. 

In  addition  to  these  alterations  to  the  established  recruiting  system, 
several  rulers  tried  to  make  use  of  the  personal  obligation  of  their  subjects  to 
perform  military  service.  From  a  typological  point  of  view  this  policy  must 
be  understood  as  being  completely  different  from  voluntary  enlistment. 
From  a  historical  point  of  view  this  policy  could  connect  with  old  but  rather 
vague  traditions.  The  duty  of  collective  resistance  against  aggressors  was 
deeply  rooted  in  European  societies,  but  it  had  not  only  been  whittled  down 
to  times  of  emergency,  but  was  also  based  on  a  much  smaller  geographical 
unit  than  the  whole  territory,  linked  as  it  was  to  local  feudal  structures  and 
to  urban30  or  rural31  municipalities.  In  the  case  of  a  general  levy  decreed  by 
the  ruler  to  defend  the  whole  territory,  a  rather  mixed  type  of  military  force 
could  emerge  from  these  structures.32  In  addition  to  the  noblemen  following 
their  feudal  obligations,  there  were  rural  levies  from  the  noble  lands  as 
well  as  from  the  ruler's  personal  estates,  organized  by  the  villages  and 
court  districts,  together  with  contingents  from  the  fortified  towns,  based 
on  their  own  local  defence  systems.  These  towns  gained  a  special  strategic 
importance  due  to  their  walls,  often  connected  with  a  certain  degree  of 
political  and  military  autonomy.  The  participation  of  townsmen  in  defence 
of  their  municipalities,  though  not  generally  of  much  military  significance, 
can  be  traced  into  the  seventeenth  and  even  eighteenth  centuries.33 

29  For  Austria,  see  Hochedlinger,  "Rekrutierung-  Militarisierung-  Modernisierung",  pp.  342-345. 

30  The  importance  of  the  armed  services  in  German  cities  has  recently  been  stressed,  though 
focusing  more  on  public  order  and  civic  mentalities  than  on  military  functions,  by  Tlusty,  The 
Martial  Ethic  in  Early  Modern  Germany. 

31  Since  local  military  customs  in  the  countryside  are  widely  unexplored,  the  edition  of  a 
late-medieval  finding  of  law  might  be  worth  taking  a  look  at;  see  Franz,  Quellen  zur  Geschichte 
des  deutschen  Bauernstandes  im  Mittelalter,  pp.  592-596. 

32  A  very  good  example  of  such  complexity  of  military  structures,  combined  with  an  edition 
of  many  archival  sources,  is  offered  by  Schennach,  Ritter,  Landsknecht,  Aufgebot. 

33  Of  course,  sieges  as  a  crucial  part  of  early  modern  warfare  were  mostly  carried  out  by  perma- 
nent or  occasional  garrison  troops  as  part  of  the  territorial  army.  On  the  role  of  the  inhabitants 
of  a  fortified  city  and  their  relationship  to  the  garrison  troops,  see  Hohrath,  "Der  Burger  im  Krieg 


210 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


Such  local  military  organizations  are  usually  called  militias.  We  lack  the 
detailed  studies  that  would  allow  us  to  construct  a  comprehensive  overview 
of  the  role  of  militias,  although  enough  is  known  to  establish  that  they  were 
of  varying  military  value.  Nevertheless,  for  many  early  modern  contempo- 
raries the  idea  of  militia  service  gained  a  special  importance,  with  military 
philosophers  such  as  Machiavelli  associating  it  with  the  much-acclaimed 
ideal  of  a  republican  military  force,  based  on  the  duty  performed  by  free 
citizens  and  seemingly  prefigured  in  the  ancient  Roman  Republic.34  In  the 
English  debates  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries  the  concept 
of  militia  was  counterposed  to  the  much  criticized  standing  armies.35  In 
Germany  during  the  same  period,  the  term  "militia"  was  frequently  ill 
defined,  and  could  even  designate  the  military  as  a  whole.  In  the  light 
of  such  divergent  terminological  usage,  I  should  emphasize  that  in  this 
chapter  "militia"  will  be  used  as  an  analytical  category,  denoting  a  kind  of 
non-professional  military  service,  based  on  common  duties,  performed  only 
on  demand,  and  therefore,  in  an  analytical  sense,  opposed  in  principle  to 
the  characteristics  of  standing  professional  armies. 

It  is  important  to  note,  however,  that  in  certain  regions  a  new  type  of 
permanent,  though  non-professional  military  service  emerged  several 
decades  before  the  establishment  of  standing  armies.  Around  1600,  threat- 
ened by  the  Eighty  Years'  War  and  the  increasing  tensions  within  the  Holy 
Roman  Empire,  some  minor  princes  and  counts  of  the  empire  started  taking 
precautionary  measures  to  prepare  their  territories  for  military  defence. 
And  while  they  lacked  the  necessary  resources  to  hire  significant  numbers 
of  mercenaries,  they  tried  to  organize  regular  military  training  for  a  large 
number  of  their  subjects  who  were  selected  in  their  communities  according 
to  prescribed  ratios.  Although  the  participants  retained  their  civil  status 
and  remained  within  their  localities,  they  were  integrated  into  a  loose 
organization,  e.g.,  by  dividing  them  into  several  companies,  which  were 
assigned  to  certain  captains.  From  time  to  time,  generally  on  Sundays, 
they  were  convoked  for  some  basic  military  training,  especially  in  the  use 
of  guns. 


der  Fiirsten";  on  the  participation  of  citizens  in  defence  efforts,  see  specifically  pp.  321-326.  It  is, 
however,  not  that  easy  to  find  significant  examples;  Schnitter,  Votk  unci  Landesdefension,  referred 
to  the  defence  of  the  Palatine  city  of  Frankenthal  against  Spanish  troops  in  1621  and  1622.  See  also 
Egler,  Die  Spanier  in  der  linksrheinischen  Pfalz,  pp.  66-68,  for  her  section  referring  to  the  Theatrum 
Europaeum;  seemingly,  however,  the  major  burden  of  defence  was  sustained  by  British  mercenaries. 

34  See  Metzger,  Die  Milizarmee  im  klassischen  Republikanismus. 

35  See  Schwoerer,  No  Standing  Armies. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750 


211 


Obviously,  these  formations36  still  met  some  crucial  criteria  for  militias, 
according  to  the  definition  given  above.  The  participants  served  as  non- 
professionals, performed  common  duties,  and,  in  a  certain  sense,  still  served 
only  occasionally.  However,  at  least  two  basic  changes  are  no  less  obvious. 
Military  service  within  these  structures  was  no  longer  limited  to  times  of 
emergency.  In  fact,  such  militias  established  a  kind  of  periodic  military 
service  in  peacetime  even  several  decades  before  standing  armies  emerged. 
Secondly,  the  legal  framework  was  renewed.  In  contrast  to  earlier  levies 
the  new  militias,  most  often  called  Landesdefensionen  (territorial  defence 
forces),  were  not  composed  of  different  contingents  but  formed  -  at  least  in 
principle  and  ignoring  the  practice  of  privileges  and  exemptions  -  a  homo- 
geneous organization  which  did  not  systematically  differentiate  between 
subjects  of  the  ruler,  subjects  of  the  noble  landlords,  and  urban  inhabit- 
ants. Unlike  earlier  municipal  militias,  which  more  or  less  kept  the  idea  of 
municipal  autonomy  and  military  self-defence,  based  -  at  least  theoretically 
-  on  a  reciprocal  military  obligation  of  the  citizens,  the  Landesdefensionen 
were  exclusively  bound  to  serve  the  rulers'  policies.  Their  emergence  can 
therefore  be  interpreted  as  enforcing  the  state-building  process,37  because 
they  helped  to  establish  a  monopoly  of  violence  and  reinforced  a  trend 
towards  the  equalization  of  the  status  of  the  ruler's  subjects  at  the  cost  of 
former  noble  and  municipal  privileges.  Of  course,  one  has  to  be  aware  of 
the  diffuse  realities  that  lay  behind  such  theoretical  abstractions,  but  the 
further  changes  to  be  discussed  below  will  confirm  the  general  thrust  of 
developments. 

Some  of  these  organizations,  e.g.  in  Saxony38  or  in  the  Electoral  Palatinate,39 
in  Bavaria,40  or  even  in  Brandenburg-Prussia,41  were  maintained  or  resur- 
rected even  after  the  end  of  the  Thirty  Years  War,  though  these  minor 
territories  started  to  build  up  permanent  forces  too.  An  even  more  striking 

36  For  an  overview,  see  Schnitter,  Volk  unci Landesdefension. 

37  See  Schulze,  "Die  deutschen  Landesdefensionen  im  16.  und  17.  Jahrhundert",  specifically 
P- 133- 

38  Naumann,  Das kursdchsische Defensionswerk  (1613  bis  ryog);  Kroll,  Sotdaten  im  18. Jahrhundert 
zwischen  Friedensatltag  und Kriegserfahrung,  pp.  125-129. 

39  Bezzel,  Geschichte  des  kurpfalzischen  Heeres. 

40  Wiirdinger,  "Die  bayerischen  Landfahnen  vom  Jahre  1651-1705";  Staudinger,  Geschichte 
des  kurbayerischen  Heeres  unter  Kurfurst  Max  II.  Emanuel  76S0-7705,  I,  pp.  648f,  II,  pp.  785ff, 
Geschichte  des  kurbayerischen  Heeres  unter  Kurfurst  Karl  Albrecht- Kaiser  KarlVII-  und  Kurfiirst 
Max  III.  Joseph  7726-7777, 1,  pp.  2i6ff. 

41  Lampe,  "Der  Milizgedanke  und  seine  Durchfiihrung  in  Brandenburg-PreuKen",  pp.  105-132 
(only  available  as  a  carbon  copy);  Gose,  "Die  brandenburgisch-preuKische  Landmiliz".  See  also, 
in  regard  to  the  duchy  of  Prussia,  later  East  Prussia,  Marwitz,  Staatsrason  und  landesdefension. 


212 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


example  for  the  relevance  of  militia  forces  within  the  framework  of  standing 
armies  emerged  in  France.  Here,  local  militias  endured  into  the  eighteenth 
century,  providing,  for  example,  soldiers  to  guard  the  coasts  and  borders. 
However,  in  1688  the  establishment  of  a  Royal  Militia  was  decreed.  This 
step  in  fact  created  a  new  type  of  militia  by  transforming  the  principle  of 
local  military  service  into  a  countrywide  organization  at  the  disposal  of  the 
king.42  Varying  numbers  of  militiamen  could  be  called  up  by  changing  the 
quotas  that  each  village  had  to  supply;  men  from  adjacent  villages  were  put 
together  in  companies;  officers  were  assigned  to  oversee  regular  training 
on  Sundays  and  holidays.  In  case  of  war,  they  formed  provincial  regiments 
which  were  put  under  the  command  of  the  army.  These  units  were  expected 
to  support  the  army  in  different  ways  with  up  to  tens  of  thousands  of  men, 
a  small  but  not  insignificant  number.  The  involuntary  involvement  of  the 
population  during  the  bellicose  reign  of  Louis  XIV,  however,  also  provoked 
resistance;  service  with  the  militia  was  perceived  as  a  "blood  tax"  on  poor 
people.  During  the  eighteenth  century  the  militia  underwent  a  change  of 
fortune  and  was  dissolved  for  many  years,  but  never  lost  its  bad  reputation. 
From  a  more  general  perspective  it  nevertheless  lent  the  French  military 
system  a  kind  of  hybrid  character  (Lynn)  by  founding  its  recruitment  on 
two  very  distinct  principles. 

Certainly  the  military  value  of  militia  units  was  limited,  and  it  in  fact 
diminished  in  comparison  to  the  increasing  efficiency  of  permanently 
maintained  troops.  Nevertheless,  militias  or  levies  were  still  employed, 
even  during  the  heyday  of  linear  warfare  in  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth 
century.43  At  the  very  least  they  seem  to  have  been  reasonably  effective  as 
defence  forces  for  fortified  places  or  against  marauders.  Thus,  in  comparison 

42  See,  for  example,  Lynn,  Giant  of  the  Grand  Siecle,  pp.  371-393;  Corvisier,  L'armee  francaise 
delafin  duXVIIe  siecle  au  ministerede  Choiseul,  I,  pp.  111-119, 197-231;  Girard,  Racolage  etmilice 
(7701-1775);  Hennet,  Les  milices  et  les  troupes  provinciales. 

43  Many  militia  activities  are  reported,  though  not  yet  systematically  explored,  from  Moravia 
and  Silesia,  the  main  theatres  of  the  Silesian  Wars;  they  are  mentioned  in  the  multi-volume  works 
of  the  official  historiography,  published  by  the  Prussian  General  Staff,  as  well  as  the  Austrian. 
See  GroKer  Generalstab,  Die  Kriege  Friedrichs  des  Grojien,  1. 3,  pp.  g8f,  101, 108, 118, 140, 161, 178, 
286f,  313,  II. 1, 77f,  101, 22of,  222f,  II. 2,  gof,  139,  II.3, 136, 143, 179,  (and  on  Saxon  militias)  194, 202, 
220,  III. 8,  3,  34f,  52,  85,  212;  corresponding  information  can  be  found  in  Kriegsgeschichtliche 
Abteilung  des  K.  und  k.  Kriegs-Archivs,  Kriege  unter  der Regierung  der  Kaiserin-Kbnigin  Maria 
Theresia.  Of  course,  there  are  also  many  hints  about  the  lack  of  efficiency  of  militias.  Striking 
is  the  chaos  caused  by  Hessian  militiamen  during  the  Battle  of  Sandershausen  in  1758;  they 
were  positioned  in  the  middle  of  the  battle  order,  became  disoriented,  panicked,  and  fired  on 
everyone,  friend  or  foe.  See  Savory,  His  Britannic  Majesty's  Army  in  Germany  during  the  Seven 
Years  War,  pp.  g6ff. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  213 

to  the  standing  troops,  the  militias  usually  played  only  an  auxiliary  role. 
For  example,  they  could  serve  as  guards,  thus  relieving  the  army  of  some 
duties  during  wartime. 

It  seems  that  the  most  important  auxiliary  function  was  to  provide 
reinforcements  for  the  army,  as  a  pool  for  voluntary  engagement  in  one 
way  or  another.  In  practice,  the  distinctions  between  these  two  types  of 
military  organization  could  become  blurred.44  Sometimes  militia  units 
were  used  directly  to  support  the  army  in  the  field  and  were  more  or  less 
integrated,  and  sometimes  rulers  called  for  direct  levies  to  fill  the  ranks  of 
the  standing  units.  Their  traditional  duty,  formerly  restricted  to  cases  of 
necessity,  rooted  in  local  contexts,  therefore  tended  to  be  transformed,  step 
by  step,  into  a  resource  for  permanent  military  efforts  at  the  unrestricted 
disposal  of  the  ruler.  Of  course,  one  should  add  the  stories  of  resistance 
against  such  measures. 

In  the  Holy  Roman  Empire  these  developments  were  also  reflected  in 
the  discourse  on  public  law  in  the  eighteenth  century.45  The  crucial  point 
was  whether  the  subjects  could  be  forced  into  military  service  beyond 
those  instances  of  acute  necessity,  which  was  out  of  the  question.  From  the 
cabinet's  point  of  view  the  differences  between  voluntary  enlistment  and 
impressment  were  less  theoretical  than  practical.  Obviously,  standing  units 
were  preferred  to  militias  because  of  their  greater  military  effectiveness. 
Enforcing  an  obligation  on  subjects  to  serve  in  the  militias,  on  the  other 
hand,  was  not  only  an  easy  way  of  recruiting,  but  also  a  cheap  one,  and  this 
was  crucial.  Militias  did  not  generate  as  many  costs  as  standing  armies; 
even  when  subjects  were  forced  to  enter  the  permanent  units  and  therefore 
came  to  be  paid  regularly,  nevertheless  the  initial  costs  of  recruitment  and 
especially  the  premiums  for  engagement  (which  were  considerable)  had 
been  saved. 

Furthermore,  it  is  worth  discussing  the  way  in  which  particular  problems 
of  recruitment  were  solved  in  Prussia  mostly  during  the  second  decade  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  not  least  because  some  contemporaries  considered  this 
solution  to  offer  an  example  to  be  followed.  In  comparison  to  the  practices 
outlined  above,  it  might  be  astonishing  to  see  that  the  Prussian  military 
build-up  started  with  a  seemingly  contrary  action.  Although  Prussia  had 

44  For  an  overview,  see  Sikora,  Disziplin  unci  Desertion,  pp.  238-243. 

45  Fichte,  Die  Begriindung  cies  Militdrdienstverhdltnisses,  pp.  136-182;  Sikora,  Disziplin  und 
Desertion,  pp.  236-238;  one  of  the  most  sophisticated  contributions,  though  clearly  situational, 
in  opposition  to  recruitments  in  Wiirttemberg,  is  [Moser],  Abhandtung  von  Noethigung  derer 
Unterthanen  zu  regulairen  Kriegs-Diensten. 


214 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


a  militia  at  its  disposal  at  the  beginning  of  the  eighteenth  century,  it  was 
dissolved  by  Frederick  William  I  soon  after  he  acceded  to  the  throne.46  His 
action  reflected  a  typical  problem  concerning  recruitment:  the  existence  of 
rivalry  The  militia  constrained  recruitment  to  the  standing  army  because 
the  members  of  the  militia  enjoyed  the  privilege  of  being  exempt  from  the 
reach  of  the  recruiting  officers.  From  this  point  of  view,  the  abolition  of  the 
militia  should  have  facilitated  more  or  less  voluntary  enlistment  because 
the  king  exclusively  favoured  the  expansion  of  the  standing  army. 

Yet  frictions  and  rivalries  continued,  no  longer  between  militia  and  army, 
but  between  the  different  regiments  of  the  army,  which  competed  to  find 
recruits  from  within  the  ruler's  territories.  What  would  come  to  constitute 
the  distinguishing  characteristics  of  the  Prussian  system  of  recruitment 
did  not  emerge  as  the  result  of  an  intentional  plan,  but  were  developed 
piecemeal  as  solutions  for  particular  problems.47  They  can  be  summarized 
under  three  headings.  First,  the  regiments  tried  to  lay  claim  to  potential 
future  recruits  to  prevent  other  regiments  from  taking  them.  Therefore,  at 
an  early  stage  they  started  to  put  the  names  of  young  boys  in  the  area  around 
their  garrisons  onto  lists,  which  were  intended  to  reserve  the  individuals 
for  service  with  the  local  regiment.  Secondly,  to  avoid  further  conflicts,  the 
central  government  started  to  draw  boundary  lines  between  the  regiments 
and  ended  up  creating  recruiting  districts,  or  so-called  Kantone,  from  which 
the  name  Kantonsystem  was  derived.  Once  the  system  was  elaborated, 
these  cantons  comprised  a  certain  number  of  households  to  assure  that 
every  regiment  had  similar  opportunities  for  recruitment.  Within  these 
cantons,  the  future  recruits  were  already  systematically  registered  by  the 
army  during  their  childhood,  a  task  which  was  subsequently  carried  out 
with  the  help  of  local  civil  officials. 

Since  the  enlargement  of  the  army  absorbed  many  domestic  recruits,  the 
more  so  since  they  were  picked  out  in  such  a  systematic  way,  the  economic 
advantages  threatened  to  turn  into  disadvantages.  The  price  was  the  loss  of 

46  In  fact,  he  did  so  less  than  two  weeks  after  the  death  of  his  father.  In  1718,  Frederick  William 
even  forbade  the  use  of  the  word  "militia",  insisting  his  troops  be  called  "regiments"  or  "soldiers". 
Obviously  the  king  was  very  keen  on  marking  the  difference:  Frauenholz,  Das Heerwesen  in  der 
Zeit  des  Absolutismus,  pp.  194, 23if. 

47  As  a  useful  outline  of  the  Kantonsystem's  development,  see  Jany,  "Die  Kantonverfassung 
Friedrich  Wilhelms  I.";  the  most  recent  contribution  to  its  exploration  is  Winter,  Untertanengeist 
durch  Militdrpflicht?  (on  its  emergence  see  specifically  pp.  39-97).  For  an  overview  of  the 
influential  debate  on  the  social  impact  of  the  Kantonsystem  and  comparisons  with  other 
practices  of  domestic  recruitment  in  German  territories,  see  Wilson,  "Social  Militarization  in 
Eighteenth-Century  Germany".  Some  documents  can  be  found  in  Frauenholz,  Das  Heerwesen 
in  der  Zeit  des  Absolutismus. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  215 

civilian  labour  force  and  tax  revenue.  This  could  partly  be  compensated  for 
by  intensifying  foreign  recruitment,  but  this  was  rather  costly.  It  could  be 
mitigated  in  detail  by  excluding  certain  professions  from  being  recruited, 
based  on  regional  and  economic  factors.48  The  most  important  way  out  of 
this  dilemma,  however,  was  to  furlough  the  domestic  soldiers,  the  Kanton- 
isten,  for  most  of  the  year.  In  fact,  during  peacetime,  they  were  obliged  to 
join  the  troops  only  for  two  months  in  spring  for  exercises  and  manoeuvres. 
This  was  the  third  main  characteristic  of  the  Kantonsystem. 

If  the  parallel  existence  of  standing  units  and  militias  maybe  perceived 
as  a  hybrid  military  organization,  the  Kantonsystem  was  an  even  more 
bastardized  form  of  recruitment.  In  its  final  stage  it  looked,  in  regard  to 
the  Kantonisten,  very  similar  to  a  militia.  Unlike  in  the  Landesdefensionen, 
however,  regular  training  did  not  take  place  in  the  civilian  environment 
in  the  form  of  afternoon  exercises,  but  was  concentrated  into  a  few  weeks 
on  the  garrisons'  drill  grounds;  therefore,  for  most  of  the  year,  the  soldiers 
lived  a  real  civilian  life  in  peacetime  (if  we  disregard  some  complications  in 
the  details).  Nevertheless,  they  were  not  organized  in  a  separate  institution 
from  the  army,  but  were  mixed  in  with  the  mercenaries  and  formed  the 
fundamental  basis  of  a  standing  army,  in  respect  of  its  numbers  as  well  as 
presumably  with  regard  to  its  mentality,  though  the  latter  is  rather  difficult 
to  discern. 

It  should  also  not  be  overlooked  that  the  intention  behind  the  Kan- 
tonsystem was  not  to  enforce  obligatory  military  service  on  all  potential 
Kantonisten,  but  rather  to  serve  as  a  tool  for  the  regiments  to  simply  refill 
their  ranks  according  to  their  current  needs.  After  all,  it  did  not  emerge  as 
an  improvement  of  former  militias,  but  as  an  optimization  of  regimental 
recruitment,  which  originally  was  based  on  individual  volunteering.  The 
Kantonsystem  was  therefore  most  precisely  characterized  as  "legalizing  a 
system  of  forced  domestic  recruitment"  ("rechtliche  Fixierung  der  inlan- 
dischen  Zwangswerbung"),49  a  definition  that  includes  the  assumption 
that  genuine  voluntary  enlistment  turned  into  a  rather  coercive  practice 
as  the  Prussian  army  doubled  in  size  under  Frederick  William  I.  As  a  result, 
however,  the  system  turned  violence  into  a  predictable  obligation  -  that  is 
to  say,  physical  force  into  legal  force  -  and  provided  continous  reinforce- 
ments for  the  army.  Therefore,  it  seemingly  offered  exemplary  solutions  for 

48  Kloosterhuis,  "Zwischen  Aufruhr  und  Akzeptanz",  Bauern,  Burger  unci  Soldaten;  Winter, 
Untertanengeist  (lurch  Militdrpflicht?,  specifically  pp.  263-275. 

49  Von  Schmoller,  Umrisse  und  Untersuchungen  zur  Verfassungs-,  Verwaltungs-  und  Wirtschafts- 
geschichte  besonders  des  Preufiischen  Staates,  p.  278. 


216 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


typical  structural  problems  of  the  time  and  inspired  similar  efforts  in  other 
territories,  such  as  Hesse-Cassel  and  Austria.50 

One  should  add  that  the  implementation  of  the  Kantonsystem  in  particu- 
lar as  well  as  militias  in  general  had  to  take  account  of  the  local  distribution 
of  power  since  feudal  structures  were  still  of  great  importance  in  parts  of 
central  Europe.  This  was  especially  true  in  regard  to  the  so-called  Gutsherr- 
sckaft  in  parts  of  Brandenburg,  where  peasants  were  subject  to  a  rigorous 
form  of  serfdom.  However,  turning  them  into  Kantonisten  also  implied 
that  they  had  been  (at  least  partially)  transferred  from  the  jurisdiction  of 
their  landlords  to  the  jurisdiction  of  the  military.  Although  they  may  be 
said  to  have  been  doubly  unfree,  there  are  also  hints  that  the  rivalry  of  two 
authorities  could  strengthen  their  position  in  conflicts  with  their  landlords. 
Therefore,  the  consequences  of  compulsory  service  in  pre-modern  societies 
may  possibly  turn  out  to  be  rather  complex,  though  this  cannot  be  discussed 
in  detail  here. 

Looking  at  the  composition  of  armies  during  the  course  of  these  transfor- 
mations, but  also  considering  the  early  modern  period  as  a  whole,  requires 
at  least  two  additional  points  to  be  made.  First,  most  observations,  including 
those  outlined  above,  deal  with  the  bulk  of  the  army,  which  was  constituted 
by  the  infantry.  However,  the  cavalry  continued  to  play  an  important  role 
on  the  battlefield  as  well  forming  a  not  insignificant  element  of  the  forces. 
Although  this  aspect  is  neglected  by  historical  research,  it  nevertheless 
seems  that  the  recruiting  of  cavalrymen  could  usually  be  maintained  by 
way  of  voluntary  enlistment,  and  the  system  did  not  face  the  problems 
encountered  with  the  recruitment  of  infantrymen.  This  was  probably  linked 
to  the  cavalry's  higher  reputation  and  possibly  also  with  a  less  exhausting 
kind  of  service.  Whatever  the  case,  the  cavalry  did  not  necessitate  the 
utilization  of  any  new  methods  of  recruitment. 

This  is  also  true,  albeit  for  different  reasons,  with  regard  to  specialist 
units  with  more  technical  functions,  such  as  the  artillery.  Although  their 
importance  on  the  battlefield  increased,  they  still  formed  only  small  units 

50  Ingrao,  The  Hessian  Mercenary  State,  pp.  132-135;  the  impact  on  rural  society  has  been 
analysed  by  Taylor,  Indentured  to  Liberty,  whose  results  provoked  a  little  controversy;  see  the 
review  by  Charles  Ingrao,  Central  European  History  27  (1994),  pp.  509-512,  and  the  reply  by  Taylor, 
"Disagreement  over  the  Hessian  Military  State  of  the  Eighteenth  Century".  Graf,  "Landesdefen- 
sion  oder  'Fundamentalmilitarisierung'?",  discusses  the  influences  of  the  older  Hessian  militias. 
The  rules  for  the  introduction  of  Kantone  in  Hesse,  decreed  in  1762,  are  printed  in  Auerbach 
and  Frohlich,  Hessische  Truppen  im  Amerikanischen  Unabhdngigkeitskrieg,  III,  pp.  2gff.  For 
Austria,  see  Szabo,  Kaunitz  and  Enlightened  Absolutism  1753-7780,  pp.  258-295;  Hochedlinger, 
"Rekrutierung  -  Militarisierung  -  Modernisierung",  pp.  345-353. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  217 

with  long-serving  soldiers,  so  that  the  need  for  recruits  was  rather  limited 
and  had  no  relevant  impact  on  the  principles  of  military  organization.51 

The  same  does  not  apply,  however,  to  the  role  of  the  nobility.  Military 
service  was  an  essential  part  of  the  nobility's  collective  identity  and  legiti- 
macy. That  did  not  mean  that  the  glorified  traditions  of  martial  endeavour 
and  chivalry  aligned  with  military  practice  at  the  end  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  Nor  did  it  mean  that  every  nobleman  actually  joined  the  army.  In 
fact,  the  Prussian  king  Frederick  William  I,  once  again,  not  only  forced  his 
subjects  into  military  service,  but  also  expected  the  noble  houses  of  his 
territory  to  send  at  least  one  son  into  the  army,  an  expectation  that  was  oc- 
casionally enforced  with  all  the  means  at  his  disposal.52  The  military  service 
of  the  domestic  nobility  should  have  facilitated  control  either  over  the  army 
or  over  the  nobility  itself.  For  many  noblemen,  in  Prussia  as  elsewhere,  a 
period  of  military  service,  even  if  only  for  a  limited  number  of  years,  still 
constituted  a  meaningful  and  indisputable  part  of  their  biography  and 
an  honourable  way  to  earn  a  living,  at  least  in  a  symbolic  sense,  since  the 
income  of  many  officerships  did  not  cover  the  costs  of  keeping  up  noble 
appearances,  which  therefore  must  have  been  paid  for  out  of  the  family 
fortune. 

In  terms  of  the  army's  composition,  the  military  service  of  the  nobility 
represented  a  third  constituent  of  military  service  alongside  voluntary 
enlistment  and  the  obligation  of  the  subjects.  The  service  of  the  nobles 
was  based  on  a  framework  of  cultural  values  and  traditions53  from  which 
ordinary  soldiers  were  excluded  and,  although  the  noble  members  of  the 
military  comprised  only  a  minority  of  the  military  personnel,  their  impor- 
tance was  enhanced  by  the  fact  that  they  almost  exclusively  occupied  the 
officerships.  This  reflected  their  privileged  position  in  the  society  of  orders, 
and  the  transference  of  these  principles  into  the  military  inevitably  led  to 
a  fundamental  separation  between  the  officers  and  the  ordinary  men  with 
regard  to  reputation,  rank,  and  mentality.  This,  however,  also  corresponded 
to  the  latter's  everyday  experience  in  civilian  life. 

Of  course,  it  has  to  be  admitted  that  not  every  officer  was  of  noble  origin. 
This  was  especially  true  for  the  technical  branches  of  the  army;  first  of  all 
the  artillery,  where  the  need  for  specialist  knowledge  made  the  service 
less  attractive  for  nobles.  This  notwithstanding,  even  in  the  infantry  and 

51  See,  for  example,  Duffy,  The  Army  of  Maria  Theresa,  p.  108. 

52  Blisch,  Militarsystem  unci Sozialleben  im  alten  Preufien,  pp.  79-83;  Gose,  "Zwischen  Garnison 
und  Rittergut". 

53  Some  general  observations  can  be  found  in  Sikora,  Disziplin  und  Desertion,  pp.  343-350. 


218 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


cavalry  there  was  some  opportunity  for  military  careers  to  be  pursued  by 
non-noble  soldiers  who  distinguished  themselves.  However,  until  the  era  of 
revolution  and  reform  these  cases  continued  to  be  individual  exceptions, 
albeit  with  some  fluctuations  over  time.  Periods  of  extended  warfare,  above 
all  the  Thirty  Years  War,  favoured  such  careers54  while  the  perpetuation  of 
the  military  organization  even  tended  to  stabilize  the  connection  between 
social  and  military  hierarchy.  Additionally  it  should  be  noted  that  climbers 
from  the  lower  ranks  were  mostly  ennobled  as  they  rose  up  the  military 
hierarchy.  In  a  certain  sense  they  adjusted  to  prevailing  socio-cultural 
norms. 

By  contrast  with  the  common  soldiers,  no  structural  changes  have  been 
detected  with  regard  to  noble  entrants  to  the  army  as  a  result  of  the  intro- 
duction of  standing  armies.  The  pressure  exercised  by  the  king  of  Prussia 
does  not  seem  to  be  representative.  The  transformation  of  the  military 
into  a  permanent  organization,  however,  changed  the  framework  for  all 
levels  of  military  service.  To  complete  the  outline  of  the  whole  process 
this  dimension  has  to  be  added  to  the  discussion  around  recruitment.  It 
certainly  also  influenced  the  motivation  of  possible  recruits. 

Observations:  conditions 

First  of  all,  the  permanence  of  the  military  allowed  for  the  period  of  military 
service  to  be  significantly  extended.  Wholesale  demobilizations  at  the 
end  of  a  war  were  reduced  step  by  step,55  although  all  states,  even  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  still  continued  to  make  use  of  the  short-term  formation 
and  disbandment  of  units.56  On  the  whole,  however,  armies  started  to  offer 
options  for  lifelong  careers,  or  at  least  a  livelihood,  though  the  changes 
should  not  be  exaggerated.  Long  periods  of  armed  conflict,  especially 
the  Thirty  Years  War,  prolonged  in  France  by  the  Franco-Spanish  War, 
required  long-term  service  which  had  not  actually  been  desired  for  its  own 
sake  at  this  time.  The  introduction  of  standing  armies,  however,  not  only 
institutionalized  long-term  service,  but  also  established  peacetime  military 
service  as  a  common  practice  for  many  thousands  of  military  employees.57 

54  See  Kaiser,  "1st  er  vom  Adel?" 

55  The  ongoing  practice  of  army  reductions  even  after  1648  has  been  emphasized  by  Kroener, 
'"Der  Krieg  hat  ein  Loch 

56  A  recently  presented  example  is  Nowosadtko,  Stehendes  Heer  im  Stdndestaat,  pp.  159-178. 

57  Ibid.,  pp.  180-185;  Prove,  Stehendes  Heer  und  stadtische  Gesellschaft  im  78.  Jahrhundert, 
pp.  88-94;  Fann,  "On  the  Infantryman's  Age  in  Eighteenth  Century  Prussia". 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  219 

It  should  be  stressed,  on  the  one  hand,  that  this  did  not  mean  that  a 
lifelong  military  occupation  became  the  norm.  Of  course,  the  military 
authorities  tried  to  keep  their  soldiers  in  service  as  long  as  possible.  This 
was  a  traditional  source  of  friction  between  military  commanders  and 
the  soldiers  because,58  during  wartime,  the  authorities  had  always  tried 
to  compel  the  soldiers  to  serve  until  the  end  of  the  conflict.  In  peacetime 
standing  armies,  the  circumstances  were  far  less  dramatic,  but  long-term 
service  was  still  in  the  interests  of  the  authorities  because  it  kept  military 
experience  and  skills  in  the  army  and  saved  the  cost  and  effort  of  recruit- 
ment. They  therefore  tried  to  impose  long-term  service  as  the  only  option; 
for  example,  in  Prussia  and  Bavaria  voluntary  enlistment  was  in  principle 
unlimited.  There  is  some  evidence  from  the  eighteenth  century  that  in  fact 
soldiers  increasingly  tended  to  spend  their  whole  professional  life  serving 
in  one  army. 

On  the  other  hand,  this  situation  was  not  in  the  interests  of  potential 
recruits.  There  is  evidence  that  most  soldiers  preferred  to  serve  for  a  limited 
time  and  that  there  was  room  for  negotiation  over  the  length  of  service 
in  some  circumstances.59  Whether  recruitment  was  being  carried  out  in 
peacetime  or  in  wartime  obviously  made  a  difference.  During  the  Silesian 
Wars  and  the  Seven  Years  War,  Bavaria  quickly  resorted  to  contracts  limiting 
military  service  to  no  more  than  three  years  just  to  get  soldiers  to  sign  on 
at  all.60  Subsequent  disagreements  over  the  contract  and  date  of  dismissal 
resulted  in  conflict  and  desertions. 

Alongside  the  introduction  of  a  standing  army,  payment  and  subsistence 
had  to  be  permanently  provided,  which  proved  a  major  challenge  for  state 
bureaucracies  and  especially  for  their  treasuries,  as  well  as  being  a  major 
factor  in  changing  the  character  of  soldiers'  working  conditions.  In  fact, 
the  authorities  managed  the  challenge  by  pragmatically  developing  mixed 
systems,  which  varied  from  time  to  time  and  from  territory  to  territory,  but 
which  typically  comprised  a  number  of  components.  Such  expedients  had 
to  some  extent  been  prefigured  during  the  Thirty  Years  War  when  they 
had  developed  as  a  result  of  the  circumstances  which  mostly  did  not  allow 
regular  payment. 

58  Redlich,  The  German  Military  Enterpriser  and  His  Work  Force,  p.  218;  Sikora,  Disziplin  unci 
Desertion,  pp.  193-196. 

59  Once  again,  see  Nowosadtko,  Stehendes  Heer  im  Stdndestaat,  pp.  180-185;  Prove,  Stehendes 
Heer  und stadtische  Gesellschaft  im  iS.Jahrhundert,  pp.  88-94. 

60  Staudinger,  Geschichte  des  kurbayerischen  Heeres  unter  Kurfurst  Karl  Albrecht  -  Kaiser  Karl 
VII.  -  und  Kurfurst  Max  III.  Joseph  7726-7777,,  I,  pp.  24of. 


220 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


Of  course,  a  monthly  payment  continued  to  form  the  core  of  remunera- 
tion. While  the  pay  of  the  mercenaries,  at  least  its  nominal  level,  had  been 
relatively  stable  during  the  sixteenth  century,  some  fluctuation  can  be 
observed  during  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth  century,  probably  be- 
cause of  the  conditions  of  the  recruitment  market.  As  a  whole  the  nominal 
level  of  the  monthly  pay  tended  to  decrease  by  up  to  50  per  cent,  although 
precise  comparisons  are  difficult  to  draw.61 

One  element  in  the  soldier's  monetary  compensation  was  the  premium, 
or  signing-on  bounty,  paid  as  a  reward  for  voluntary  enlistment,  and  this  did 
increase  in  importance.  Originally  recruits  had  received  a  certain  sum  to 
cover  the  costs  of  travelling  from  the  place  of  recruitment  to  the  place  where 
the  recruits  were  mustered.  Later  on,  this  payment  changed  its  function 
and  became  a  very  flexible  device  that  recruiters  used  to  compete  with  one 
another.62  Of  course,  the  premium  was  designed  to  overcome  a  potential 
recruit's  immediate  concerns  and  to  obscure  the  conditions  of  long-term 
service,  and  certainly  its  value  to  the  recruit  was  negligible  in  the  context 
of  an  extended  period  of  soldiering.  Nevertheless,  the  premium  might 
well  have  weighed  heavily  with  some  potential  recruits  as  they  sought  to 
evaluate  the  benefits  and  risks  of  signing  on.  On  the  whole,  it  is  clear  that 
the  military  authorities  focused  their  efforts  on  the  act  of  enlistment.  Once 
recruited,  the  men  were  subjected  to  the  judicial  consequences  of  their 
contract  and  oath63  and  the  constraints  of  the  institution.  In  this  sense, 
premiums,  as  well  as  forced  recruitments,  compensated  for  a  lack  of  supply, 
which  was  partly  caused  by  poor  salaries,  which,  for  their  part,  resulted 
from  the  costs  of  standing  armies. 

The  monetary  payment  did  not  cover  all  the  soldier's  needs.  He  required 
clothes  and  weapons,  food,  quarters,  and  some  everyday  commodities.  In 
contrast  to  previous  practice,  clothes  and  weapons  were  usually  delivered  by 
the  authorities.  This  was,  incidentally,  the  reason  why  clothing  became  more 
and  more  "uniform",  since  it  was  ordered  in  large  quantities  and  increasingly 
prescribed  in  detail.64  In  some  armies  and  in  some  periods,  however,  the 

61  Burschel,  Soldner im Nordwestdeutschland des  76.  undij.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  188,  igif.;  Redlich, 
The  German  Military  Enterpriser  and  His  WorkForce,  II,  pp.  27, 29. 

62  Burschel,  Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschland  des  76.  undij.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  102-104;  Redlich, 
The  German  Military  Enterpriser  and  His  WorkForce,  II,  pp.  15-18. 

63  Sikora,  Disziplin  und Desertion,  p.  129;  Fichte,  Die Begriindung  des Militardienstverhaltnisses, 
pp.  88-118. 

64  Hohrath,  "Uniform";  deep  insights  into  the  material  culture  of  an  eighteenth-century 
army,  with  plenty  of  illustrations,  are  now  provided  by  Hohrath,  Friedrich  der  Grojie  und  die 
Uniformierung  der preujiischen  Armee. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  221 

cost  of  the  equipment  was  deducted  from  soldiers'  pay.  There  were  similar 
options  to  ensure  the  nourishment  of  the  soldiers.  Sometimes  the  soldiers 
had  to  use  their  pay  to  buy  food  on  the  open  market;  at  other  times  basic 
foodstuffs  were  delivered  to  the  army.  In  this  case,  sometimes  the  food  was 
free  and  at  times  it  was  deducted  from  the  soldier's  pay.  Finally,  in  many 
territories,  lodging  was  still  provided  by  the  civilian  population,  since  the 
construction  of  barracks,  as  in  France,  remained  the  exception  rather  than 
the  rule,  and  the  soldiers  were  allocated  to  private  households.  Commodities 
that  the  soldiers  could  demand  in  many  cases  included  wood,  wax,  salt, 
pepper,  and  vinegar.  It  seems  to  have  been  a  widespread  practice  to  shift 
the  delivery  of  these  items  to  the  hosts,  which  could  be  considered  a  kind 
of  tax.  In  some  regions  the  hosts  even  had  to  serve  the  food  for  the  soldiers. 

Thus,  the  income  of  the  soldiers  was  a  mix  of  money  and  non-cash  ben- 
efits.65 It  is  difficult  to  evaluate  the  totals,  but  it  seems  reasonable  to  suggest 
that  the  level  of  the  soldiers'  income  was  comparable  with  the  earnings  of 
day-labourers  or  clerks  on  the  lowest  level.  This  may  have  allowed  at  best  a 
modest,  but  stable  living,  though  some  documents  also  reveal  complaints 
of  poor  conditions.  These  were  also  reflected  in  the  regulations  restricting 
the  soldier's  right  to  marry.  Such  restrictions  were  designed  to  limit  the 
number  of  dependent  women  and  children  in  armies,  with  their  associated 
costs.66  For  a  minority  of  soldiers  things  could  turn  for  the  better  since 
wages  grew  significantly  as  they  climbed  the  hierarchy  of  ranks.  Common 
soldiers  could  supplement  their  income  by  taking  on  additional  overtime 
shifts  within  the  military,  and  also  by  offering  their  labour  on  the  civilian 
market  or  by  selling  simple  products.67  Many  of  them,  for  example,  were 
former  journeymen.  So  even  non-military  components  can  be  added  to  a 
diversified  set  of  income  sources  and  benefits,  which  on  the  whole  ensured 
the  livelihood  of  the  soldiers. 

The  non-military  aspect  of  the  soldier's  occupation  directs  the  focus  to  the 
form  of  military  service  itself.  Customary  peacetime  functions  consisted  of 
guard  duty  and  sometimes  possibly  small  missions  to  maintain  public  order, 
since  the  authorities  did  not  yet  have  the  large  numbers  of  personnel  required 

65  These  paragraphs  are  a  summary  of  the  findings  of  Burschel,  Soldner  imNordwestdeutschland 
des  76.  undry.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  188-192;  Redlich,  The  German  MUitary  Enterpriser  and  His  Work 
Force,  II,  pp.  236-258. 

66  Much  deeper  insight  on  this  subject  can  be  found  in  Engelen,  Soldatenfrauen  in  Preujien; 
on  the  regulations,  see  pp.  41-68. 

67  Nowosadtko,  Stehendes Heer im  Stdndestaat,  pp.  234-241;  Kroll,  Soldaten  im  i8.Jahrhundert 
zwischen  Friedensalltag  und  Kriegserfahrung,  pp.  286-289;  Prove,  Stehendes  Heer  undstddtische 
Gesellschaft  im  i8.Jahrhundert,  pp.  252-266,  also  discusses  illegal  incomes. 


222 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


to  enforce  the  civil  law.  However,  these  functions  could  be  fulfilled  by  a  small 
fraction  of  the  soldiers  recruited  into  the  burgeoning  standing  armies.  In 
fact  soldiers  of  these  armies  enjoyed  a  lot  of  time  unoccupied  by  military 
duties,68  as  their  additional  earnings  indicated.  They  fulfilled  their  military 
function,  at  least  partly,  by  their  simple  presence  and  availability.  Of  course,  the 
maintenance  of  their  fighting  abilities  was  part  of  their  everyday  life  as  well. 

This  military  training  corresponded  to  the  principles  of  so-called  linear 
warfare  which  took  its  more  or  less  final  shape  towards  the  end  of  the 
seventeenth  century.69  The  collective  formations  of  the  soldiers  had  changed 
over  decades  from  large  squares  to  broad  but  thin  lines  only  four  or  three 
men  deep.  Since  trained  infantrymen  deployed  in  such  a  fashion  presented 
a  powerful  defensive  formation,  the  extra  numbers  recruited  into  armies 
could  be  used  to  broaden  the  formation,  with  the  option  of  outflanking 
the  adversary.  For  the  majority  of  soldiers  the  objectives  of  military  train- 
ing derived  from  this  formation  although  the  enduring  importance  of  the 
cavalry  and  the  growing  importance  of  the  artillery  should  not  be  denied. 

It  is  well  known  and  obvious  even  from  this  very  short  description  that 
this  kind  of  warfare  did  not  call  for  outstanding  dexterity  and  flexibility 
on  the  part  of  the  soldiers.  The  main  issue  was  to  ensure  that  they  were 
obedient  and  acted  in  a  co-ordinated  way.  The  major  skills  required  were 
the  use  of  the  musket  and  collective  movements  of  the  whole  body  of  troops. 
The  handling  of  the  musket  was  broken  down  into  a  certain  number  of 
distinct  movements  which  were  linked  to  specific  commands.  Contem- 
porary military  authors  loved  to  illustrate  this  technique  by  presenting 
image  sequences  which  in  a  certain  sense  prefigured  modern  instruction 
manuals  by  representing  standardized  operations.70  This  dissection  of  the 
required  movements  seemingly  facilitated  teaching  the  recruits  the  use  of 
muskets,  which  in  fact  required  a  complex  sequence  of  manoeuvres  since 
they  were  still  one-shot  muzzle  loaders.  Additionally,  the  fragmentation 
allowed  progress  in  co-ordinating  the  action  of  the  troops.  By  dividing  a 
single  operation  into  a  series  of  discrete  movements,  the  operation  could 
be  reconstructed  as  a  collective  action.  Even  more  delicate  was  the  chal- 
lenge of  moving  many  thousands  of  men  on  the  battlefield  in  the  described 
way,  when  the  front  of  an  army  could  span  several  kilometres.  This  not 

68  Prove,  Stehendes  Heer  unci  stddtische  Gesellschaft  im  iS.Jahrhundert,  pp.  155-159;  Burschel, 
Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschland  des  76.  undij.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  214-217. 

69  Lynn,  Battle,  pp.  111-125. 

70  Sikora,  "Die  Mechanisierung  des  Kriegers";  see  also  Wellmann,  "Hand  und  Leib,  Arbeiten 
und  Uben". 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  223 

only  required  strict  discipline  to  keep  the  soldiers  in  line  but,  in  advance 
of  this,  long  columns  of  marching  soldiers  also  had  to  be  deployed  and 
transformed  into  a  line,  ideally  without  considerable  gaps  opening  up  and 
sections  overlapping,  all  the  while  taking  account  of  the  conditions  on  the 
battlefield  and  the  actions  of  the  adversaries. 

To  keep  control  over  the  troops  according  to  these  principles  and  under 
such  circumstances,  peacetime  training  seemingly  was  inevitable  and  must 
therefore  be  considered  a  crucial  precondition  for  linear  warfare.  Of  course, 
there  were  some  differences  between  chronological  periods  and  armies  with 
regard  to  the  intensity  of  the  training,  which  ranged  from  one  or  two  times 
a  week  up  to  daily  exercises  in  the  later  Prussian  army,  albeit  still  limited  to 
the  morning.71  Training  for  collective  movements  was  done  in  small  units 
since  the  performance  of  large-scale  manoeuvres  required  considerable 
effort  and  these  were  reduced  to,  at  best,  annual  events,  which  may  have 
become  spectacular  affairs  attracting  members  of  the  court  and  foreign 
observers.72  Certainly  it  must  be  admitted  that  the  theory  in  books  and  even 
the  practice  on  the  parade  ground  did  not  exactly  represent  the  reality  of 
the  battlefield,  something  which  will  not  be  discussed  at  this  juncture.  On 
the  other  hand,  however,  regular  training  not  only  implied  something  like 
an  employment  scheme  for  the  soldiers  and  an  attempt  to  control  future 
battles,  but  also  a  certain  military  mentality. 

This  elaborate  method  of  military  training,  which  became  well  known  as 
drill,  can  be  traced  back  to  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century,  when  the  military 
leaders  of  the  Dutch  revolt  tried  to  increase  the  efficiency  of  their  military 
forces  in  their  struggle  against  the  superior  Spanish  army.  Their  reforms 
were  inspired  not  only  by  military  experience,  but  also  by  contemporary 
philosophy  and  the  ideas  of  military  authors  of  late  antiquity.73  Therefore,  they 
propagated  not  only  certain  details  of  military  tactics  and  training,  but  also 
the  ethical  ideals  of  the  perfect  soldier,  which  were  integrated  into  a  renewed 
concept  of  military  discipline.  While  losing  some  of  its  sophistication,  the  idea 
of  discipline  remained  a  key  concept  in  the  debates  of  military  authors.  It  was 
substantiated  not  only  in  the  image  sequences  mentioned  above,  but  also  in 

71  All  details  of  Prussian  military  training,  at  least  as  they  were  intended  to  be  fulfilled,  can  be 
derived  from  regulations  which  covered  the  entire  spectrum  of  military  duties  and  are  mostly 
available  as  reprints;  the  most  important  are  Reglementvor  die  Konigl.  Preujiische  Infanterie  [...] 
(Potsdam,  1726,  repr.  Onsbariick,  1968)  and,  Reglementvor  die  Konigl.  Preujiische  Infanterie  [...] 
(Berlin,  1943,  repr.  Osnabriick,  1976). 

72  Luh,  Kriegskunst  in  Europa  1650-1800,  pp.  194-208. 

73  Sikora,  "Die  Mechanisierung  des  Kriegers";  Sicken,  "Die  oranische  Heeresreform";  Hahlweg, 
Die  Heeresreformer  der  Oranier  unddie  Antike, 


224 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


various  ways  in  which  weapon-handling  was  dealt  with  in  the  growing  num- 
ber of  military  manuals,  which  tended  to  increase  the  number  of  individual 
movements  soldiers  were  expected  to  perform  and  commands  they  had  to 
obey74  They  shaped  an  image  of  soldiers  as  subject  to  a  rather  mechanical 
ideal  of  training  and  fighting.  Beyond  the  pure  rationale  of  combat  efficiency 
the  whole  appearance  of  the  soldiers  was  expected  to  reflect  the  qualities  of 
discipline  and  obedience  that  imbued  their  whole  being. 

Once  again  it  should  be  stressed  that  the  reality  of  the  parade  ground 
probably  looked  much  more  prosaic  than  theories  and  manuals  suggest,  but 
without  doubt  the  introduction  of  standing  armies  created  the  conditions 
for  a  significantly  higher  level  of  control  over  the  soldiers.  This  control  was 
expressed  through  more  than  just  regular  drills.  It  became  manifest  in  a 
certain  weakening  of  the  soldiers'  rights  as  well.  In  contrast  to  the  mercenar- 
ies in  the  armies  of  the  sixteenth  century,  who  had  cultivated  some  elements 
of  corporate  autonomy  and  representation  based  on  their  self-conception  as 
contractual  partners,75  members  of  the  standing  armies  were  increasingly 
subject  to  the  one-sided  duties  confirmed  by  their  oaths  and  subordinated 
to  a  militaryjustice  that  was  handled  by  academically  trained  jurists  in  the 
interests  of  and  according  to  the  guidelines  of  the  rulers.  As  one  example,  it 
has  been  observed  that,  starting  with  the  Dutch  reformers,  the  soldiers  were 
confronted  with  demands  to  carry  out  construction  work  on  entrenchments 
and  fortifications.76  Although  the  real  extent  of  such  work  cannot  be  quanti- 
fied, the  claim  marks  a  significant  change,  since  such  duties  were  strongly 
resisted  during  the  heyday  of  mercenary  business  as  incompatible  with  the 
honour  of  the  warriors.  The  increase  in  control  in  the  seventeenth  century 
was  also  reflected  in  the  intensified  use  of  written  means  of  registration 
and  periodic  inventory.77  Even  the  distribution  of  uniform  clothing  can  be 
regarded  as  a  symbolic  expression  of  increasing  control  as  it  reduced  the 
opportunity  for  individual  expression  and  even  eccentricity,  which  seems 
to  have  been  quite  typical  of  the  older  mercenary  tradition.78 

74  Kleinschmidt,  Tyrocinium  Mititare. 

75  Baumann,  Landsknechte,  pp.  92-130;  Moller,  Das  Regiment  der  Landsknechte,  pp.  52-112. 

76  Burschel,  Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschland  des  76.  und  i/.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  137-138. 

77  See,  for  France,  the  insight  in  the  vast  possible  quantity  of  data  from  the  French  records 
provided  by  Corvisier,  Les  controles  des  troupes  de  I'Ancien  Regime.  Almost  all  Prussian  lists 
were  lost  during  the  Second  World  War,  but  even  a  single  example  can  give  an  impression 
of  the  intensity  of  documentation;  see  (with  photographic  reproductions  of  the  lists)  Hanne 
(introduction),  Rangirrolle,  Listen  und  Extracte ...  von  Saldern  Infanterie  Regiment  Anno  7777. 

78  Rogg,  "Zerhauen  und  zerschnitten,  nachadelichen  Sitten",  including  reflections  on  the 
interdependence  between  military  clothing,  civilian  clothing,  and  the  progress  of  military 
discipline.  For  a  number  of  visual  examples,  see  Rogg,  Landsknechte  und  Reislaufer. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  225 

Seemingly,  the  military  turned  out  to  be  that  element  of  the  population 
that  was  best  controlled  and  most  disciplined  by  the  authorities,  with  the 
exception  of  prisoners.  However,  a  mere  listing  of  those  factors  that  drove 
the  move  towards  the  implementation  of  ever  more  restrictive  discipline 
should  not  lead  us  to  believe  that  the  military  was  transformed  into  a 
frictionless  machine  (not  an  arbitrary  metaphor,  but  one  which  became 
common  at  least  during  the  eighteenth  century).79  Although  it  is  almost 
impossible  to  compare  the  level  of  insubordination  and  refusal,  abuse,  and 
disorder  over  time  and  changing  conditions,  at  least  the  manifestations 
of  refusal  seem  to  have  changed  their  profile.  While  mutinies  apparently 
caught  much  attention  and  reflected  the  structures  typical  of  the  classic 
mercenary  armies,80  they  mostly  disappeared  from  around  the  middle  of 
the  seventeenth  century  or  were  at  least  reduced  to  minor  and  exceptional 
incidents.  This  might  have  been  the  combined  result  of  several  factors:  the 
increase  in  control  and  the  decrease  in  collective  advocacy  of  common 
interests,  but  also  the  stabilization  of  maintenance  and  payment  which, 
though  the  sums  were  still  rather  poor,  nevertheless  probably  prevented 
discontent  and  resistance. 

On  the  other  hand,  desertion  started  to  attract  much  more  attention 
and  effort.81  To  be  sure,  soldiers  had  deserted  in  the  preceding  period,  too, 
perhaps  in  significant  numbers,  but  the  phenomenon  remained  relatively 
invisible  to  historians,  since  even  contemporary  authorities  did  not  or  were 
not  able  to  focus  on  this  subject.  From  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth 
century,  however,  desertion  was  especially  addressed  in  an  increasing  num- 
ber of  edicts  and  decrees.  It  became  more  precisely  defined  in  these  edicts 
and  in  the  juridical  debate,  and  in  Germany  even  the  word  started  to  become 
established  as  a  technical  term.82  The  growing  tendency  of  authorities  to 
categorize,  list,  and  archive  thus  provides  the  historian  with  more  abundant 
documentation  of  the  phenomenon  which,  although  often  fragmentary, 
allows  a  more  complete  picture  to  be  established  than  for  earlier  periods. 

79  See  Sikora,  Disziplin  unci  Desertion,  pp.  45f;  for  the  parallels  between  the  military  discourse 
and  the  discourse  on  state  politics,  see  Stollberg-Rilinger,  Der  Staatats  Maschine. 

80  Parker,  "Mutiny  and  Discontent  in  the  Spanish  Army  of  Flanders";  Baumann,  "Protest 
und  Verweigerung  in  der  Zeit  der  klassischen  Soldnerheere";  Burschel,  Soldner  im  Nordwest- 
deutschland  des  76.  undry.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  195-198. 

81  See  Sikora,  Disziplin  und  Desertion;  on  desertion  before  the  era  of  standing  armies,  see 
the  contributions  from  Reinhard  Baumann,  Michael  Kaiser  and  Peter  Burschel  in  Brockling 
and  Sikora,  Armeen  und  ihre  Deserteure;  for  a  different  viewpoint,  see  Muth,  Flucht  aus  dem 
militdrischen  Atltag. 

82  Sikora,  Disziplin  und  Desertion,  pp.  54f. 


226 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


The  motives  for  desertion  must  be  regarded  as  diverse,  but  certainly 
enforced  enlistment,  violent  modes  of  training  and  disciplining,  and  contro- 
versies over  the  conditions  of  service  played  a  major  role  during  peacetime. 
Of  course,  the  reasons  and  motives  for  desertion  took  a  much  more  exis- 
tential shape  during  wartime,  due  to  considerable  physical  exertion,  poor 
weather  conditions,  the  lack  of  maintenance,  and  disintegration  caused  by 
military  defeats.  But  even  then,  at  least,  mutinies  remained  an  exception. 

Therefore,  on  the  whole,  the  intensified  focus  on  desertion  does  not 
just  indicate  friction  and  considerable  differences  between  the  ideal  of 
discipline  and  control  and  the  realities  of  garrison  life  and  campaigns. 
Alongside  this,  desertion  must  partly  be  interpreted  as  a  reaction  to,  and 
an  unintended  result  of,  an  increasing  level  of  control  and  coercion.  Thirdly, 
however,  the  efforts  to  record  and  to  prevent  desertion  themselves  reflect 
the  increasing  efficiency  of  control.  In  this  sense  the  shift  from  mutinies 
to  desertions  can  also  be  labelled  as  the  individualization,  isolation,  and 
marginalization  of  refusal. 

In  summary,  the  introduction  of  standing  armies  significantly  changed 
the  conditions  of  military  service  and  the  appearance  of  the  soldiers.  The 
permanence  of  the  organization  even  during  peacetime  transformed 
military  service  into  a  reliable  long-term,  if  not  lifelong,  occupation  which, 
paradoxically,  meant  that  fighting  was  not  the  only  job  undertaken  by  sol- 
diers. Continuous  training  ensured  a  higher  level  of  fighting  skills,  although 
these  skills  consisted  of  rather  simple,  mechanical  manual  operations.  One 
should  also  note  the  significantly  higher  level  of  regulation,  control,  and 
discipline,  which  were  accompanied  by  a  greater  use  of  coercion  and  internal 
violence.  To  situate  the  period  1650-1750  and  the  central  European  experi- 
ence within  the  broader  framework  of  military  labour,  however,  requires 
some  further  discussion  of  basic  issues,  not  least  recruitment,  for  the  method 
of  recruitment  profoundly  influenced  the  basic  constitution  of  the  military. 

General  discussion:  structures  of  recruitment 

As  outlined  above,  recruitment  changed  its  shape,  too.  Since  the  concept 
of  mercenary  service  seems  to  be  inevitably  connected  with  the  principle 
of  free  contracting,  the  growing  importance  both  of  forced  enlistment 
and  of  part-time  soldiers  such  as  militiamen  or  Kantonisten  may  indicate 
a  possible  discrepancy  and  the  need  for  a  reassessment  of  our  typological 
categorization.  On  the  one  hand,  one  must  stress  the  increasingly  hybrid 
character  of  the  processes  of  recruitment  as  a  pronounced  feature  of  this 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  227 

stage  of  the  development.  It  is  characteristic  mainly  because  it  indicates  a 
crisis  in  the  customary  modes  of  recruitment,  as  described  above. 

On  the  other  hand,  soldiers  serving  on  the  basis  of  a  contract  still  formed 
the  backbone  of  the  armies.  Of  course,  the  increasing  number  of  soldiers 
who  were  forced  into  a  contract  partly  changed  the  face  of  military  service 
and  violated  the  principles  of  voluntary  enlistment.  However,  it  is  hardly 
possible  to  define  the  forced  soldiers  as  a  new  and  distinctive  type  of  mili- 
tary service.  First  of  all,  it  is  impossible  to  quantify  precisely  that  proportion 
of  the  soldiers  who  really  had  volunteered,  for  whatever  reason,  how  many 
of  them  had  been  duped,  and  how  many  had  been  forced  into  the  army  by 
other  means.  The  number  of  involuntary  soldiers,  however  defined,  was 
probably  significant,  but  there  is  no  basis  for  the  assumption  that  they 
were  dominant.  Rather,  and  more  importantly,  one  has  to  assume  that, 
beyond  the  ideal  types  of  voluntary  enlistments  and  enlistments  forced 
by  physical  violence,  the  distinctions  between  voluntary  and  involuntary 
were  quite  fluid. 

At  least,  the  military  authorities  did  not  draw  any  distinction  and  dealt 
with  all  the  contracted  soldiers  according  to  the  terms  of  contract  or,  in 
practice,  according  to  their  own  view  of  those  terms.  The  one-sided  interpre- 
tation of  military  duties  imposed  by  the  authorities  could  add  yet  another 
aspect  of  force  to  the  conditions  of  service  from  which  all  soldiers  suffered 
in  the  same  way.  On  the  other  hand,  the  authorities  did  not  order  or  even 
legalize  forced  recruitments.  However,  they  were  widely  tolerated.  At  most, 
authorities  exceptionally  intervened  when  forced  recruitments  caused  too 
much  dissent.  Jurists  who  considered  the  issue  dealt  very  cautiously  with 
it.  At  least,  the  number  of  scholars  who  critically  discussed  the  validity  of 
a  contract  concluded  by  force  gradually  grew.83  The  crucial  point  was  that 
the  authorities  insisted  on  high  numbers  of  recruits  with  no  respect  to  the 
actual  supply  on  the  labour  market. 

Therefore,  more  or  less  inevitably,  force  and  violence  were  adopted  by  the 
recruiting  officers  in  times  of  exceptional  demand.  It  was  a  means  for  them 
to  deal  with  low  supply,  to  compete  with  other  recruiters,  and  to  fulfil  the 
demands  of  their  superiors.  This  might  have  happened  within  or  beyond  the 
borders  of  the  territory  and  therefore  still  resulted  in  individual  contracts 
without  systematic  recourse  to  any  general  obligations  of  the  subjects.  Obvi- 
ously, these  practices  introduced  more  force  into  the  military  organizations 
and,  in  this  sense,  might  be  seen  in  parallel  to  the  increasing  importance 

83  Fichte,  Die  Begriindung  des  Militardienstverhaltnisses ,  pp.  123-136,  correcting  Sikora, 
Disziplin  und Desertion,  p.  222. 


228 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


of  military  drill.  They  emerged  gradually  as  an  unpremeditated  corollary 
of  armies'  growth  and,  in  a  formal  sense,  still  harked  back  to  the  character 
of  voluntary  enlistment,  ending  up  in  an  individual  contract.  Therefore  it 
seems  reasonable  to  address  these  practices  as  an  extreme  or  maybe  even 
corrupted  variety  within  the  framework  of  individual  engagement,  at  least 
intended  to  be  voluntary.  Since  they  were  not  systematically  introduced, 
were  without  legal  basis,  and  had  no  definite  characteristics,  they  can 
hardly  be  analysed  as  a  distinctive  and  discrete  alternative  principle. 

In  contrast,  this  was  definitely  the  case  with  regard  to  the  militias.  Their 
importance  may  be  discussed  in  an  even  broader  context,  as  possible  fore- 
runners of  the  military  draft.  For  example,  Andre  Corvisier  unhesitatingly 
considered  the  establishment  of  the  Royal  Militia  in  1688  as  the  start  of 
the  draft  in  France.84  Of  course,  the  Prussian  Kantonsystem  has  also  been 
discussed  in  regard  to  the  emergence  of  the  draft.  Though  a  certain  continu- 
ity cannot  be  denied  -  and  was  even  emphasized  by  Prussian  reformers  at 
the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century85  -  one  should  be  aware  that  the 
system  was  not  intended  to  impose  military  service  generally  across  the 
board  but  to  serve  as  a  tool  for  a  selective  supplementation  of  the  regiments. 
Moreover,  like  other  militia  organizations,  it  was  embedded  in  a  pre-modern 
society,  and  accordingly  included  a  long  list  of  exemptions  from  service  as  a 
Kantonist  due  to  collective  privileges  or  for  economic  reasons.  Thus,  these 
organizations  were  far  from  implementing  a  general  and  equal  duty  with 
all  its  socio-political  implications. 

Even  from  a  more  pragmatic  perspective  one  has  to  keep  in  mind  that, 
in  the  framework  of  the  standing  armies,  the  militias'  functions  remained 
mostly  subsidiary  to  those  of  the  units  of  long-term  professional  soldiers. 
In  most  territories,  militiamen,  numerically,  formed  only  a  small  or  at  least 
the  smaller  proportion  of  the  military.  Although  militia  units  were  used 
on  the  battlefield,  alongside  the  line  regiments,  large-scale  warfare  was 
based  on  the  standing  professional  army.  When  militias  were  used  as  pools 
for  recruitment,  they  simply  turned  into  a  more  refined  option  for  the 
reinforcement  of  the  standing  armies. 

The  example  of  the  Prussian  Kantonsystem  stands  out  as  an  exception 
since  the  call-up  of  peasants  established  a  semi-professional  -  or,  in  regard 

84  Corvisier,  "Les  transformations  de  l'armee  au  XVIIe  siecle",  p.  90.  For  a  recent  contribution 
to  this  debate,  see  Hippler,  Citizens,  Soldiers  and  National  Armies,  which  includes  considerations 
on  the  Royal  Militia,  pp.  18-23. 

85  For  a  discussion  on  tradition  and  innovation  in  regard  to  the  Prussian  military  reforms,  see 
Sikora,  "Militarisierung  und  Zivilisierung",  pp.  172-178;  Winter,  "Kontinuitat  oder  Neuanfang?" 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750 


229 


to  their  absence  for  the  most  part  of  the  year,  somewhat  like  a  "quarter"- 
professional  -  structure  as  a  pillar  of  the  state's  military  strength.  From  its 
emergence,  however,  this  system  can  be  traced  back  to  pragmatic  solutions 
avoiding  the  abuses  of  voluntary  enlistment  and  did  not  emerge  from  the 
militias.  As  mentioned  above,  the  Prussian  militias  were  dissolved  even 
before  the  establishment  of  the  Kantonsystem,  since  they  weakened  the 
number  of  potential  recruits  for  the  recruiters.  It  is  also  remarkable  that, 
later  on,  the  Prussian  officials  still  fell  back  on  the  militias  in  times  of  urgent 
necessity.  During  the  Seven  Years  War  in  particular,  regional  militias  were 
raised.86  As  local  and  regional  defence  forces  they  simply  performed  the  tra- 
ditional function  of  militias.  In  relation  to  the  standing  armies  they  served 
as  an  emergency  stopgap  if  troops  were  absent  and  provided,  in  practice, 
hardly  any  real  support  for  the  army.  The  burden  of  strategic  warfare  was 
exclusively  shouldered  by  the  permanent  units  including  the  Kantonisten. 

To  sum  up,  standing  armies  of  this  period  should  still  be  considered  as 
being  dominated  by  the  principle  of  individual  enlistment,  intended  to  be 
voluntary.  If  this  argument  is  accepted,  one  can  describe  military  service 
in  this  period  as  mostly  characterized  by  free  and  commodified  forms  of 
labour.  In  fact,  this  points  to  a  basic  similarity  with  the  preceding  forms  of 
mercenary  service  since  this  maybe  considered  as  the  major  manifestation  of 
commodified  military  labour.  As  has  been  pointed  out,  not  all  military  service 
was  of  this  kind,  and  the  principle  of  free  and  commodified  labour  was  to  some 
degree  adulterated  by  the  growing  use  of  impressment,  the  incorporation  of 
militiamen  into  the  professional  forces,  and  the  hybrid  type  of  Kantonisten. 

Nevertheless,  the  essence  of  mercenary  service  still  was  far  from  eroded 
altogether.  Whether  to  still  call  these  organizations  mercenary  armies  or 
not  depends  upon  one's  point  of  view:  whether  one  wants  to  stress  that  the 
changes  around  1500  and  around  1800  were  much  more  deeply  rooted  and 
categorical  than  the  changes  around  1700,  or  whether  one  wants  to  privilege 
the  differences  that  have  been  outlined  on  the  preceding  pages.  The  author 
would  tend  to  stress  the  continuity  of  mercenary  service;87  although  obvi- 
ously significant  and  profound  changes  of  military  organizations  took  place 
during  the  period  under  discussion,  they  cannot  be  simply  described  as  a 
disappearance  of  mercenary  structures.  The  change  emerged  and  proceeded 
within  a  framework  dominated  by  paid  military  service. 

86  Lampe,  "Der  Milizgedanke  und  seine  Durchfiihrung  in  Brandenburg-PreuKen",  pp.  138-148; 
Schwartz,  Organisation  und  Verpflegung  der  preussischen  Lanmilizen  im  Siebenjahrigen  Krieg. 

87  For  broader  argumentation  on  the  characteristics  of  mercenary  service  and  its  significance 
in  regard  to  early  modern  military  structures,  see  Sikora,  "Soldner". 


230 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


It  should  be  noted,  however,  that  the  concept  of  the  mercenary,  although 
the  term  is  well  established  in  common  and  scientific  language,  raises  some 
problems.  From  the  beginning  of  the  early  modern  period,  since  the  days 
of  Machiavelli,  mercenaries  were  the  object  not  only  of  military  discourse, 
but  also  of  political  and  moral  attributions.  This  was  exacerbated  from 
the  perspective  of  observers  looking  back  from  the  nineteenth  century, 
who  condemned  mercenary  service  as  a  fundamental  contradiction  to  the 
basic  values  of  the  nation-state.  Even  nowadays  the  debate  on  mercenaries 
depends  not  only  on  objective  analysis,  but  also  on  political  outlook.  For 
example,  modern  juridical  definitions  of  mercenaries  in  fact  exclude  such 
institutions  as  the  French  and  Spanish  Foreign  Legions  which,  according  to 
widespread  understanding,  are  otherwise  perceived  as  typical  examples  of 
mercenary  units;  the  criteria  of  these  definitions  are  also  difficult  to  apply 
to  an  unequivocal  classification  of  private  military  companies.88  Therefore, 
the  term  "mercenary  service"  must  be  used  with  caution  and  reflection. 

Since  the  ideological  components  of  mercenary  definitions  complicate 
the  analytical  use  of  the  concept,  the  definition  should  be  reduced  to  its 
crucial  formal  feature,  which  is  the  individual  contract  as  the  basis  of  a  -  at 
least  intentional  -  free  and  commodified  type  of  military  labour.  In  this 
sense,  the  concept  of  mercenary  service  still  seems  the  most  adequate  cat- 
egory for  use  in  characterization  and  analysis  of  the  dominating  structure 
of  military  service  in  the  eighteenth  century.  Thus,  to  discuss  the  transi- 
tions of  mercenary  armies,  one  has  to  revert  to  a  lower  level  of  structural 
characteristics,  just  to  gain  slightly  more  sophisticated  arguments.  Such 
arguments  can  be  determined  from  the  common  characteristics  that  usu- 
ally are  associated  with  the  concept  of  mercenary  service. 

General  discussion:  factors  of  cohesion 

One  such  characteristic  seems  to  be  the  general  understanding  that  merce- 
naries are  basically  defined  by  the  fact  that  they  were  foreigners  in  relation 
to  their  engagement.  The  category  of  foreigner  raises  problems  when  used 

88  See,  for  example,  Major,  "Mercenaries  and  International  Law";  recent  publications  onjuridi- 
cal  problems  concerning  mercenary  business  include  Bakker  and  Sossai,  Multilevel  Regulation 
of  Military  andSecurity  Contractors;  Francioni  and  Ronzitti,  War  by  Contract;  and  in  a  historical 
context  Sikora,  "Soldner",  pp.  2iif.  The  juridical  framework  was  fixed  as  a  resolution  of  the 
General  Assembly  of  the  United  Nations  in  the  International  Convention  against  the  Recruit- 
ment, Use,  Financing  and  Training  of  Mercenaries,  A/Res/44/34, 4  December  1989,  http://www. 
un.org/ga/documents/gadocs.htm. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  231 

in  the  context  of  the  early  modern  period.  For  example,  the  Spanish  army 
fighting  against  the  Dutch  Revolt,  several  decades  before  the  era  discussed 
here,  was  composed  of  a  significant  portion  of  Dutch  soldiers,89  who  accord- 
ingly fought  in  their  own  homeland  and  for  their  legitimate  ruling  authority 
On  the  other  hand,  they  were  in  a  rather  ambiguous  position  since  they 
could  also  be  viewed  as  foreign  members  of  a  foreign  army  Other  examples 
from  the  Thirty  Years'  War,  chosen  at  random,  reveal  the  predominantly 
regional  character  of  voluntary  enlistment,  or  mercenary  engagement, 
depending  on  the  place  where  the  recruitment  was  undertaken.90  This  could 
mean  that  large  numbers  of  a  ruler's  subjects  joined  up  when  the  ruler  or 
his  army  commander  decided  to  initiate  recruitment  within  or  close  to 
the  ruler's  territory. 

Although  the  composition  of  armies  before  1650  obviously  was  not  of 
purely  foreign  origin  as  most  definitions  of  mercenary  would  imply,  it  seems 
that  the  percentage  of  homeland  recruits  increased  as  a  consequence  of  the 
establishment  of  standing  armies;  above  all,  as  a  consequence  of  increased 
efforts  to  raise  recruits  from  the  ruler's  own  territory.  It  is  true  that  pro- 
portions varied,  but  nevertheless  genuinely  foreign  recruits  remained  a 
significant  element  of  armies.  Change,  in  this  respect,  was  more  gradual 
than  is  suggested  by  those  who  pose  a  sharp  dichotomy  between  mercenary 
and  standing  armies.  Indeed,  one  may  argue  that  although  the  percentage  of 
domestic  recruits  grew  significantly,  this  was  not  the  defining  characteristic 
of  standing  armies  since  the  number  of  foreigners  in  their  ranks  remained 
relevant.  To  put  it  another  way,  this  fact  indicates  that,  in  principle,  the 
origin  of  the  soldiers  was  still  largely  irrelevant.  It  would  probably  be  helpful 
and  adequate  for  analytical  purposes  to  simply  omit  the  criterion  of  origin 
for  defining  mercenary  service,  at  least  in  regard  to  the  early  modern  period, 
but  this  is  not  essential  for  the  problems  discussed  here. 

A  more  significant  change  may  be  detected  regarding  the  framework  of 
military  labour.  Some  aspects  of  this  have  already  been  alluded  to  earlier, 
and  these  can  be  encapsulated  in  the  notion  of  uniformity.  This  was  literally 
true  concerning  military  dress,  and  nearly  so  for  the  modes  of  fighting 
and  the  body  movements  of  the  soldiers,  which  were  intended  to  become 
programmed.  Of  course,  regulations  should  not  be  mixed  up  with  the 
reality  on  the  battlefield,  but  the  impact  of  military  drill  should  not  be 
underestimated  either.  Although  the  mercenaries  of  previous  decades  were 

89  Parker,  The  Army  of  Flanders  and  the  Spanish  Road,  pp.  2jit,  zyif. 

90  Burschel,  Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschland  des  r6.  undij.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  145-150;  Kapser, 
Die  bayerische Kriegsorganisation  in  der zweiten  Halfte  des Dreijiigjahrigen  Krieges,  pp.  250-261. 


232 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


supposed  to  fight  as  a  part  of  a  homogeneous  body  of  soldiers,  the  personal 
drill  created  a  new  level  of  control  and  discipline. 

In  a  broader  sense,  a  similar  argument  can  be  advanced  concerning  the 
relationship  between  soldiers  and  military  commanders  since  the  soldiers' 
earlier  options  of  self-determination  and  protest,  though  they  should  not 
be  overestimated,  were  weakened  in  favour  of  the  total  submission  of  the 
soldiers  to  the  disciplinary  power  of  their  drill  masters,  and  to  a  military 
justice  run  in  the  interests  of  the  military  commander.  Even  the  fact  of 
peacetime  service  can  be  interpreted  as  a  factor  leading  to  greater  uniform- 
ity. Since  the  actions  of  mercenaries  in  the  past  had  been  exclusively  linked 
with  the  conduct  of  war,  their  image,  for  better  or  worse,  was  dominated  by 
the  connotations  of  fighting  and  bravery,  violence  and  cruelty,  adventure 
and  misery.  The  peacetime  members  of  a  standing  army  were  much  more  on 
show  and  to  a  larger  audience  than  before,  but  the  public  perceived  them  as 
guardsmen,  as  puppets  on  the  strings  of  commanders,  and  even  as  earning 
money,  employed  not  only  as  soldiers,  but  working  with  their  own  hands 
in  just  the  same  way  as  many  others  in  town  worked.  Having  a  night  out 
on  the  town  with  comrades  and  enjoying  the  ensuing  debauchery  seemed 
to  be  the  most  singular  aspects  of  a  soldier's  life,  but  social  acceptance  of 
these  activities  depended  largely  on  one's  point  of  view. 

This  certainly  must  have  had  consequences  for  the  conception  of  the 
role  of  the  soldiers.  Recent  research  has  done  much  to  add  to  our  under- 
standing of  the  public  perception  and  self-perception  of  the  mercenaries 
in  their  heyday  in  the  sixteenth  century,  most  prominently  reflected  and 
certainly  idealized  in  many  printed  woodcuts,  but  also  documented  in 
clothes,  songs,  poems,  plays,  and  (mostly  very  critical)  treatises.91  Comments 
from  non-soldiers  mostly  combined  criticisms  of  their  idleness,  violence, 
and  immorality  with  a  certain  fascination,  which  seemingly  fed  into  the 
self-perception  of  mercenaries,  thereby  helping  to  enhance  their  status  as 
an  order  of  outsiders,  based  on  claims  of  a  distinctive  honour,  autonomy, 
and  extravagance  as  well  as  on  superiority  and  a  disdain  for  civilian  life. 
Though  extremely  ambiguous,  being  a  mercenary  attracted  a  lot  of  attention 
and  promised,  if  not  esteem,  a  kind  of  fearful  respect. 

No  such  claims  can  be  asserted  on  behalf  of  the  members  of  standing 
armies.  Most  obviously,  these  soldiers  were  far  less  attractive  for  artists,  at 
least  in  the  singular.  The  soldiers  were  mostly  depicted  as  drilled  puppets 
or  as  uniformed  masses.  Though  they  were  still  the  object  of  much  moral 

91  Huntebrinker,  "Fromme  Knechte"  unci  "Garteteufel",  pp.  87-173;  Rogg,  Landsknechte  unci 
Reisldufer;  Burschel,  Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschtand  cles  76.  undry.Jahrhunderts,  pp.  27-38. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750 


233 


criticism,  the  most  prominent  attitude  beyond  this  seems  to  have  been  pity, 
due  to  the  poor  conditions  of  life  and  demeaning  discipline.  A  few  memoirs 
reflect  at  best  a  kind  of  picaresque  way  of  life,  but  no  evidence  for  keeping 
the  former  nimbus  of  extravagant,  though  intimidating  adventures.92 

From  an  analytical  perspective,  the  changes  can  probably  best  be  con- 
ceived as  a  quantum  leap  in  professionalization.  The  possibility  of  lifelong 
service,  or  at  least  continuous  service  uninterrupted  by  peacetime  lay-offs, 
as  well  as  newly  rigorous  regulation,  which  should  not  only  be  interpreted  in 
the  framework  of  military  discipline,  but  also  as  a  job  description,  compris- 
ing both  lists  of  duties  and  special  skills,  contributed  to  shaping  a  daily 
working  routine.  Thus,  the  decline  of  public  attention  and  attraction  can 
also  be  understood  as  an  aspect  of  the  soldiers'  normalization  and  inte- 
gration into  civilian  society.  As  a  result,  the  mercenaries  of  the  standing 
armies  achieved  a  much  higher  level  of  professional  standards  than  former 
mercenaries,  who  were  already  commonly  perceived  as  professionals.  In 
partial  contrast  to  this  chapter's  emphasis  on  some  crucial  continuities, 
this  reshaping  of  military  service  has  also  been  taken  as  an  argument  to 
evaluate  these  changes  as  a  categorical  transformation  from  "mercenary" 
to  "soldier".93  In  terms  of  soldiers'  self-conception,  the  new  standards  left 
space  for  adopting  a  kind  of  professional  self-esteem;  however,  there  is  only  a 
little  evidence  for  its  real  relevance.  Towards  the  end  of  the  century,  military 
authorities  tried  to  encourage  its  emergence  by  praise  and  rewards.94 

General  discussion:  making  a  living 

As  outlined  above,  soldiers'  incomes  had  lost  much  of  their  appeal.  This  is 
of  particular  importance  since  the  desire  for  personal  gain  is  commonly 

92  Some  of  the  most  cited  sources  of  this  kind  include  Braker,  Lebensgeschichte  undNatiirtiche 
Ebentheuer desArmen Marines im  Tockenburg;Seume,MeinLeben;Kerhr,Ausdemsiebenjahrigen 
Krieg;F[riedrich]  C[hristian]  Laukhards,vorzeiten  Magisters  der  Philosophie,  undjetzt Musketiers. 

93  See  Burschel,  "Krieg,  Staat,  Disziplin",  based  onBurschel,  Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschland 
des  76.  und  ry.Jahrhunderts. 

94  A  public  celebration  to  acclaim  a  Saxon  non-commissioned  officer  for  fifty  years  of  service 
is  anonymously  reported  in  "Schilderung  einer  Nationalscene",  Bellona  (1781),  pp.  89-96.  Some 
memoirs  can  also  be  understood  as  an  expression  of  a  proud  professional  self-esteem,  for  exam- 
ple, those  of  a  former  Prussian  non-commissioned  officer,  who  had  served  for  fifty-two  years: 
see  Leben  und  Thaten  eines  Preufiischen  Regiments-Tambours.  Certainly  an  extreme  example, 
but  nevertheless  striking,  is  Miiller,  Der  wohl  exercirte  Preufiische  Soldat,  a  treatise  by  a  former 
Prussian  musketeer  who  felt  compelled  to  explain  the  principles  of  Prussian  military  training 
to  the  public. 


234 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


considered  the  exclusive  motivation  for  mercenary  service.  Obviously, 
service  as  a  member  of  a  standing  army  did  not  offer  much  prospect  of 
enrichment.  Of  course,  in  former  times,  the  mercenaries'  hope  for  wealth 
through  booty  had  been  mostly  unrealized.  As  was  pointed  out  above,  with 
regard  to  material  rewards,  military  service  at  least  offered  an  alternative 
option  among  other  occupations  at  the  lower  end  of  the  social  pyramid.  In 
addition,  when  one  considers  the  attractiveness  of  the  signing-on  bounty 
and  the  longer  term  prospects,  there  is  no  reason  to  deny  that  the  expec- 
tation of  a  poor,  but  at  least  reliable  livelihood  may  have  swayed  those 
contemplating  service.  Such  considerations  weighed  all  the  more  heavily 
when  the  soldier's  comparatively  stable  existence  is  compared  to  the  poor 
conditions  in  rural  villages,  which  were  always  threatened  by  the  risks  of 
fluctuating  crop  yields.  The  desire  for  private  gain  was,  then,  most  likely  a 
relevant  factor  in  motivating  soldiers. 

Of  course,  it  is  impossible  to  gain  a  complete  understanding  of  the 
soldiers'  motives;  this  is  all  the  more  true  when  dealing  with  less  obvious 
assumptions  and  with  the  question  of  whether  the  introduction  of  standing 
armies  offered  new  kinds  of  collective  motivation.  There  are  hints  of  the 
importance  of  a  certain  esprit  de  corps,  which  was  usually  related  not  to 
the  army  as  a  whole,  but  to  the  regiment.95  Of  course  its  effects  could  have 
an  impact  only  after  recruitment.  Certainly,  the  permanent  existence  of 
the  units  strengthened  these  effects  on  a  smaller  scale  by  stabilizing  peer 
group  structures  and,  on  a  larger  scale,  by  grouping  together  icons  of  glory 
and  tradition  and  transforming  them  into  a  regimental  memorial  culture. 
In  fact,  this  kind  of  collective  identity  seems  to  have  been  supported  by  the 
military  authorities  and,  since  it  corresponded  to  the  values  of  noble  honour 
and  to  the  social  logic  of  rank  and  reputation,  it  might  have  been  the  most 
typical  motivational  factor.  In  a  more  general  sense,  it  can  be  considered  a 
special  mode  of  professional  self-confidence. 

In  the  light  of  a  growing  percentage  of  native  soldiers,  it  seems  reason- 
able to  assume  that  there  was  an  increasing  importance  of  some  kind  of 
patriotism  or  loyalty  to  the  ruler  or  at  least  a  certain  sense  of  duty.  Prob- 
ably, the  Prussian  system  favoured  the  transfer  of  some  provincial  or  even 
local  identity  into  the  army  by  keeping  Kantonisten  from  the  same  area 


95  Nowosadtko,  Stehendes  Heer  im  Stdndestaat,  pp.  90-97;  Kroll,  Soldaten  im  iS.Jahrhundert 
zwischen  Friedensalltag  und  Kriegserfahrung,  pp.  205-220;  Sikora,  Disziplin  und  Desertion, 
pp.  268-281. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  235 

together.96  However,  since  there  is  very  little  evidence  on  the  thoughts  of 
ordinary  soldiers,  generalized  assumptions  about  the  motivation  of  soldiers 
are  rather  speculative.97  At  the  very  least,  it  can  be  stated  that  there  is  no 
evidence  of  widespread  enthusiasm  for  military  service  or  of  systematic 
efforts  to  appeal  to  the  common  people  in  terms  of  patriotic  loyalty.  This 
became  more  prominent  only  in  later  eighteenth-century  discourse,  but 
mostly  as  a  debate  among  the  elites.  In  summary,  although  the  changing 
framework  of  military  service  undoubtedly  influenced  soldiers'  motives,  it 
is  impossible  to  gain  a  reliable  insight  into  these  on  a  larger  scale.  Of  course, 
one  has  to  expect  a  certain  mix  of  motives,  and  probably  the  changing 
composition  of  the  armies  caused  an  increasing  variety  thereof. 

General  discussion:  military  labour  and  state-building 

Soldiers'  motives,  however,  may  be  discussed  on  a  broader  horizon  since 
the  establishment  of  standing  armies  formed  one  aspect  of  an  even  more 
important  process.  From  the  perspective  of  state-building,  standing  armies 
represented  the  crucial  manifestation  of  state  structures  themselves.  In 
contrast,  these  structures  definitely  lacked  the  fully  developed  character 
of  state  authority,  as  long  as  military  power  could  be  exercised  by  rather 
autonomous  commanders  as  Wallenstein  or  Bernhard  of  Saxe-Weimar,  who, 
according  to  the  work  of  Fritz  Redlich,  are  usually  designated  as  military 
enterprisers,  or  by  high-ranking  nobles  in  France,  making  use  of  their  own 
kind  of  autonomy  and  independence.98  However,  this  is  not  the  place  to 
discuss  similarities  or  differences  between  figures  such  as  Wallenstein 
and  Conde.  Regarding  the  military,  the  major  challenge  of  state-building 
was  the  integration  of  more  or  less  autonomous  military  structures  and  the 
marginalization  of  any  form  of  opposing  military  organization.  In  fact,  the 
establishment  of  standing  armies  reflected  the  establishment  of  a  monopoly 
of  violence. 

96  King  Frederick  II  once  wrote  in  his  political  testament  from  1768  that  the  Kantonsystem 
would  encourage  rivalry  between  soldiers  for  a  reputation  for  bravery  and  that  friends  and 
relatives,  fighting  together,  would  not  leave  each  other:  Dietrich,  Die  politischen  Testamente 
der Hohenzollern,  pp.  5i6f. 

97  For  some  reflections  on  this  subject,  see  Kroll,  Soldaten  im  i8.Jahrhundert zwischen  Frieden- 
salltag  und Kriegserfahrung,  pp.  133-179;  Sikora,  Disziplin  und Desertion,  pp.  305-325. 

98  Lynn,  Giant  of  the  Grand  Siecle,  pp.  284-286;  Parrott,  Richelieu's  Army,  pp.  313-365,  sees  a 
strong  contrast  between  military  enterprisers  and  the  French  army,  but  also  gives  examples  of 
the  crucial  role  of  the  high  nobility  and  their  networks. 


236 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


Regarding  the  military  organization  itself,  the  contrast  should  not  be 
stressed  too  sharply.  The  military  before  1650  was  not  a  completely  private 
business.  Normally,  troops  were  raised  at  the  level  of  the  regiment  by 
licensed  colonels,  who  had  capital  and  networks  at  their  disposal  to  fulfil 
organizational  work  which,  at  that  stage,  could  not  be  performed  by  the 
ruler's  administration.  The  licence,  however,  included,  beyond  basic  regula- 
tions, a  commitment  to  the  ruler  as  the  only  source  of  legitimate  power." 
Our  concept  of  a  military  enterpriser  would  be  misleading  if  military 
business  were  to  be  perceived  as  totally  independent  from  the  framework 
of  legitimate  power.  The  princes  simply  could  not  enforce  total  control.  On 
the  other  hand,  even  the  structures  of  the  standing  armies  still  provided 
a  certain  potential  for  independent  economy,  in  German  armies  mostly 
shifting  from  the  level  of  regiments  to  the  level  of  companies,  forming  the 
so-called  Kompaniewirtschaft.100  Certainly,  colonels  and  captains  could  no 
longer  act  against  the  ruler,  and  most  definitely  had  to  act  according  to  a 
more  detailed  set  of  regulations,  but  the  regiments  and  companies  still 
formed,  if  not  autonomous,  then  self-contained  units,  combining  training, 
economy,  justice,  and  command,  which  were  all  in  the  hands  of  the  com- 
manding officers.  The  regiments  and  the  companies  remained  a  source  of 
considerable  income  for  them.  Since  all  sums  for  paying,  equipping,  and 
maintaining  the  soldiers  went  through  their  hands,  based  on  fixed  rates 
paid  by  the  government,  the  colonels  and  captains  not  only  took  their  own 
salaries  but  also  benefited  from  the  profits  to  be  made  from  managing  their 
units,  whether  these  were  legal  or  illicit.101  For  example,  probably  the  most 
widely  practised  swindle  was  receiving  money  for  soldiers  who  had  never 
existed  or  who  had  left  the  unit  as  a  result  of  desertion  or  death. 

With  regard  to  the  common  soldiers,  they  suffered  much  more  from  the 
intensified  control,  as  a  result  of  greater  surveillance  and  military  discipline, 
which  was  discussed  above  and  which  can  also  be  interpreted  as  the  out- 
come of  state-building.  Of  course,  as  employees,  the  monopoly  of  violence 

99  This  has  been  recently  stressed  by  Baumann,  "Die  deutschen  Condottieri".  In  contrast 
to  warlords  such  as  Wallenstein  or  Bernhard  of  Saxe-Weimar  during  the  Thirty  Years  War, 
one  should  also  keep  in  mind  the  example  of  the  very  important  Catholic  general  Johann 
Tserclaes  Count  of  Tilly,  who  acted  with  extraordinary  loyalty  to  and  trust  in  his  sovereign, 
Duke  Maximilian  of  Bavaria:  see  Kaiser,  Politik  unci  Kriegfiihrung,  specifically  pp.  16-23. 

100  Redlich,  The  German  Military  Enterpriser  and  His  WorkForce,  pp.  77-88. 

101  John  Lynn  calls  the  structures  of  the  French  army  in  the  eighteenth  century  still  a  "semi- 
entrepreneurial  system";  see  Lynn,  Battle,  pp.  137-139,  361.  The  term  was  originally  coined  by 
David  Parrott,  who  avoided  using  it  in  his  recent  works  in  order  to  stress  the  differences  between 
French  practices  and  German  military  enterprisers. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  237 

was  less  relevant  for  them  than  the  monopoly  of  employment.  However,  it 
is  not  certain  whether  they  really  profited  from  business  competition  in 
former  decades  and,  as  already  mentioned,  competition  for  recruits  still  took 
place  in  some  regions  and  probably  offered  more  opportunities  for  negotia- 
tion than  before.  This  resulted  from  supply  and  demand,  not  from  the  fact 
that  the  recruiters  were  no  longer  enterprisers  but  government  employees. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  increased  effectiveness  of  ruling  elites  and  military 
organizations  also  resulted  in  a  suspension  of  the  market  mechanisms 
through  forced  recruitment,  as  a  result  of  which  many  impressed  soldiers 
paid  a  very  one-sided,  existential  price  by  suffering  not  only  from  coercion, 
but  also  from  war  injuries  and  death.  Obviously,  the  high  authorities  were 
less  engaged  in  disciplining  such  recruiting  methods.  Therefore,  for  the 
soldiers,  the  changes  deriving  from  the  increasing  control  over  the  military 
commanders  seem  to  have  been  of  less  importance. 

As  a  result,  most  observations  suggest  considering  the  changes  as  more 
gradual  than  categorical.  Summed  up,  however,  the  gradual  changes  resulted 
in  a  framework  of  military  service  which  was  substantially  different  from  the 
preceding  period,  though  mostly  based  on  the  same  principles.  As  a  common 
denominator,  inevitably  rather  general  and  superficial,  the  different  levels  of 
change  might  be  conceptualized  as  aspects  of  an  ongoing  institutionaliza- 
tion and  integration  of  the  military  as  a  whole  within  the  framework  of 
state-building.  From  this  perspective,  the  reduced  autonomy  of  the  military 
commanders  and  their  incorporation  in  the  corps  of  public  servants  can  be 
paralleled  to  the  intensified  disciplining  and  uniforming  of  the  common 
soldiers  and  their  location  in  the  everyday  life  of  the  garrison  cities. 

Despite  all  the  continuities,  developments  around  the  establishment 
of  standing  armies  marked  a  crucial  phase  in  European  military  history. 
Although  drill  practice  had  been  invented  several  decades  earlier,  its  imple- 
mentation as  a  common  European  feature  created  an  outstanding  attribute 
of  modern  military  organizations  as  a  whole.  Obviously,  military  obligations 
imposed  on  the  subjects  became  increasingly  significant,  although  they  had 
not  yet  became  dominant  and  still  served  only  subsidiary  purposes,  mostly 
to  avoid  the  costs  of  recruitment.  Nonetheless,  these  practices  prepared  the 
way  for  the  development  of  the  draft  and  seem  to  characterize  this  period  as 
a  stage  of  transition  in  which  different  principles  were  combined.  However, 
instead  of  reducing  this  era  to  a  prelude  not  yet  determined,  it  might  be 
more  adequate  to  perceive  it  as  the  unfolding  of  options  in  the  course  of 
emerging  state  power.  Not  surprisingly,  the  reasons  and  motives  for  this 
dynamic  process  have  attracted  much  scholarly  attention.  The  debate  was 


238 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


significantly  shaped  by  Michael  Roberts's  concept  of  a  "military  revolution". 10Z 
This  is  not  the  place  to  either  sum  up  the  whole  controversial  debate  or  to 
reinvent  the  answers.  Some  aspects  of  the  debate,  however,  will  help  to  put 
the  changes  in  an  evolutionary  context. 

According  to  the  original  concept,  the  military  revolution  was  completed 
just  before  the  spread  of  standing  armies,  but  these  were  still  perceived  as 
an  outcome  of  the  revolution,  flanked  by  the  strengthening  and  centraliza- 
tion of  political  power  to  provide  the  required  resources.  The  roots  of  this 
process  were  traced  back  to  the  tactical  reforms  at  the  end  of  the  sixteenth 
century.  The  main  thesis,  therefore,  was  aimed  at  the  assumption  that  not 
only  military  changes,  but  also  major  social  and  political  developments, 
were  initiated  by  genuine  military  innovations.  These  started  with  a  new 
tactic  and  in  addition  were  fuelled  by  the  new  scale  of  strategic  warfare 
during  the  Thirty  Years  War,  characterized  by  long-range  campaigns  and 
the  need  for  numerous  occupational  forces.  This  should  have  resulted  in 
the  need  for  more  soldiers. 

One  may  object  that  the  main  example,  the  campaigns  of  Gustav  Adolf, 
were  noteworthy  due  to  the  constraints,  from  the  Swedish  perspective, 
of  a  quasi-overseas  theatre  of  war,  and  that  subsequent  wars  did  not  see 
comparable  strategic  efforts.  On  a  more  general  level,  it  has  to  be  considered 
that  the  appetite  for  a  growing  number  of  soldiers  may  have  been  motivated 
by  even  simpler  arguments:  since  technological  means  were  rather  limited 
in  their  impact,  military  superiority  normally  was  achieved  by  larger  armies. 
From  this  point  of  view,  the  more  crucial  change  must  be  considered  the 
previous  replacement  of  feudal  armies  by  mercenary  armies,  the  expansion 
of  which  was  only  limited  by  the  need  for  money,  while  feudal  structures 
had  restricted  at  least  the  core  of  military  power  to  the  limited  number 
of  more  or  less  obstinate  nobles.  The  further  development  seems  to  have 
been  mostly,  although  certainly  not  solely,  dependent  on  the  government's 
increasing  possibility  to  absorb  resources. 

Certainly,  the  Dutch  reforms  implemented  an  important  additional 
aspect.  Originally  introduced  to  compensate  for  the  numerical  inferiority 
of  the  Dutch  forces,  the  result  of  the  reforms  turned  out  to  be  a  significant 

102  Roberts,  The  Military  Revolution,  7560-1660;  since  then,  the  concept  of  a  "military  revolution" 
has  been  firmly  established  in  academic  curricula,  but  has  also  been  widely  and  critically 
discussed  and,  on  the  other  hand,  expanded  to  other  periods  and  to  other  parts  of  the  world,  so 
that  it  has  rather  lost  its  significance.  Classical  critics  include  Parker,  The  Military  Revolution, 
and  Black,  A  Military  Revolution?  See  now  Black,  Beyond  the  Military  Revolution.  Other  recent 
publications  referring  to  the  catchword  include  Knox  and  Murray,  The  Dynamics  of  Military 
Revolution,  1300-2050,  and  Nimwegen,  The  Dutch  Army  and  the  Military  Revolutions  1588-1688. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750  239 

increase  in  military  effectiveness.  After  this  time,  the  value  of  soldiers 
could  be  measured  not  only  by  their  number,  but  also  by  the  quality  of 
their  training.  Therefore,  preparing  the  military  forces  before  the  start 
of  war  became  an  inevitable  prerequisite  for  military  effectiveness  and 
consequently  resulted  in  standing  armies.  Even  then,  sheer  superiority  of 
numbers  did  not  ensure  success  on  the  battlefield,  as  the  remarkable  victory 
of  inferior  forces,  such  as  the  Prussians'  at  the  battle  of  Leuthen  in  1757, 
indicates.103  However,  such  instances  did  not  encourage  the  king  of  Prussia 
or  other  rulers  to  reduce  their  forces  by  replacing  quantity  with  quality. 

A  short  remark  must  support  the  assertion  that  technological  innova- 
tion was  of  less  importance,  since  the  seventeenth  century  saw  two  major 
changes.  This  was  the  replacement  of  matchlock  guns  with  flintlock  guns, 
which  were  easier  to  handle,  and  the  total  abandonment  of  pikes  in  favour  of 
the  exclusive  use  of  guns,  which  could  be  adapted  to  hand-to-hand  combat 
by  the  use  of  the  newly  invented  bayonet.  Certainly,  the  disappearance  of 
the  pike  marked  a  watershed  of  great  symbolic  meaning  since  it  represented 
the  triumph  of  gunpowder  weapons.  This  story,  however,  covers  at  least  two 
centuries,  step  by  step,  and  was  not  completed  until  the  beginning  of  the 
eighteenth  century.104  It  is  noteworthy  that,  during  the  eighteenth  century 
bayonet  attacks  -  thus  the  use  of  the  reduced,  but  much  more  manageable 
version  of  pikes  -  in  fact  could  become  decisive  on  the  battlefield.105  Though 
it  was  accompanied  by  tactical  changes,  the  final  abandonment  of  pikes 
did  not  indicate  a  technological  revolution,  nor  does  it  offer  explanations 
for  the  arms  race  at  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century. 

This  seems  also  to  be  true  in  regard  to  the  growing  importance  of  the 
artillery  in  the  eighteenth  century.  Due  to  technological  changes,  which 
made  cannons  more  mobile  on  the  battlefield,  and  the  corresponding  tacti- 
cal changes,  the  artillery's  role  was  subsequently  transformed  from  a  merely 
subsidiary  one  to  having  a  crucial,  though  not  yet  decisive,  importance  of 
its  own.106  Although  the  intensified  use  of  artillery  caused  considerable  losses 
and  suffering,  it  still  did  not  modify  the  efforts  to  produce  the  highest  pos- 
sible number  of  soldiers  nor  did  it  affect  the  basic  structural  characteristics 
of  military  service. 

103  As  a  sceptical  approach  to  a  rather  mystifying  event,  see  Kroener,  "Die  Geburt  eines  Mythos 
-  die  'schiefe  Schlachtordnung'". 

104  See,  among  others,  Black,  European  Warfare  1660-1875,  p.  39;  Luh,  Ancien  Regime  Warfare 
and  the  Military  Revolution,  p.  139. 

105  Luh,  Ancien  Regime  Warfare  and  the  Military  Revolution,  pp.  156-160. 

106  Ibid.,  pp.  167-178. 


240 


MICHAEL  SIKORA 


The  essential  precondition  for  the  quantum  leap  in  army  strength  was  the 
strengthening  of  centralized  political  power  and  intensified  accumulation 
of  resources.  The  military  development  reflected,  and  was  closely  connected 
to,  a  restructuring  of  governance,  pushed  forward  by  the  experiences  and 
the  results  of  the  Thirty  Years  War,  including  a  new  framework  for  state 
rivalry  In  different  ways,  at  different  moments,  and  with  different  degrees 
of  success,  but  focused  on  a  few  decades,  rulers  profited  from  the  defeat  of 
their  enemies,  the  breaking  of  opposition,  the  weakening  of  participatory 
elites,  the  establishment  of  consensual  policies  in  favour  of  external  compe- 
tition, and,  last  but  not  least,  the  amelioration  of  confessional  antagonisms. 
In  this  sense,  it  has  been  suggested  that  the  Thirty  Years  War  enjoys  real 
significance  as  a  state-building  war.107 

The  stabilization  of  internal  hierarchies  and  administrative  structures 
enabled  governments  to  draw  conclusions  from  the  rather  improvised 
handling  of  warfare  during  the  war,  including  military  strength,  tactical 
innovations,  control  and  efficiency  of  the  military,  and  discipline  of  the 
common  soldier  -  all  the  aspects  discussed  above.  The  ongoing  conflicts 
over  hegemony  on  the  continent,  the  Baltic,  and  the  Balkans  compelled 
all  participants  to  reach  comparable  levels  of  operational  readiness  and 
accelerated  the  spread  of  standing  armies.  Therefore,  they  represented  both 
the  slowdown  of  internal  rivalries  and  a  certain  acceleration  of  external 
rivalries.  The  spending  of  most  resources  on  the  needs  of  the  military 
pushed  the  soldiers  into  the  centre  of  this  process.  In  fact,  one  may  assert 
that  they  were  the  most  intensively  governed  section  of  the  population.  It  is 
no  wonder  that  they  also  became  a  symbolic  medium  to  express  the  ruler's 
power  and  sovereignty  (and  in  a  certain  sense,  condensed  in  parades  and 
guards  of  honour,  they  have  kept  this  meaning  until  today).  The  quality  of 
change  in  terms  of  the  political  framework  can  be  paralleled,  in  some  way,  to 
the  changes  in  military  organization  as  an  essential  part  of  this  framework. 

However,  although  the  institutionalization  of  governmental  power 
reached  new  heights  of  efficiency  and  stability,  some  basic  elements  stayed 
the  same.  The  revolution  had  not  yet  arrived.  Most  people  were  still  governed 

107  This  point  mainly  follows  the  arguments  of  Black,  A  Military  Revolution?,  pp.  67-77,  including 
aspects  of  changes  in  the  sphere  of  political  constitution  and  the  socio-political  role  of  the 
elites.  In  this  wide  sense,  the  category  of  state-building  wars  was  elaborated  by  Burkhardt, 
Der  Dreijiigjahrige  Krieg,  in  nuce  on  p.  27.  This  perspective  also  touches  on  the  debate  on  the 
fiscal-military  state,  which  was  brought  up  by  Brewer,  The  Sinews  of  Power.  See  also  Storrs,  The 
Fiscal-Military  State  in  Eighteenth  Century  Europe,  and  Glete,  War  and  the  State  in  Early  Modern 
Europe;  however,  the  complexities  of  this  approach  cannot  be  discussed  and  included  at  this 
point. 


CHANGE  AND  CONTINUITY  IN  MERCENARY  ARMIES:  CENTRAL  EUROPE,  1650-1750 


241 


by  dynasties  from  the  high  nobility  whose  attitudes  towards  the  military 
forces  were  not  substantially  different  from  those  of  former  monarchs.  The 
augmentation  of  army  strength  and  the  extension  of  compulsory  service 
resulted  from  the  intensified  power  of  governments  to  intervene  in  their 
citizens'  lives  and  was  not  paralleled  by  a  newly  defined  and  founded 
relationship  between  subjects  and  state. 

Therefore,  it  remained  a  maxim  of  ruling  and  of  warfare  that  the  soldier's 
role  was  still  a  functional  one  based  on  payment  and  force.  There  was  a 
closely  connected  political  implication,  namely  that  these  armies  were  at 
the  disposal  of  monarchs  and  ministers,  instruments  of  their  ambitions  and 
interests,  and  deployed  within  the  context  of  cabinet  warfare.  To  continue 
the  metaphorical  framework,  the  soldiers  served  as  hired  or  forced  construc- 
tion workers  in  the  building  of  the  state,  at  best  being  inhabitants  without 
rights;  they  were  in  no  way  co-proprietors. 


Peasants  fighting  for  a  living  in  early 
modern  North  India 

DirkH.A.Kolff 

It  is  several  years  since  historians  have  abandoned  the  idea  of  medieval 
and  early  modern  India  as  a  huge  but  static  collection  of  economically  self- 
sufficient  and  politically  autonomous  village  units.  With  respect  to  large  parts 
of  India,  another  image  has  taken  its  place,  that  of  a  dual  world,  composed 
on  the  one  hand  of  a  sedentarized  segment  of  settled,  rain-fed  agriculture 
and,  on  the  other,  one  of  mobile  pastoralism  in  the  arid  half  of  the  Indian 
subcontinent.  The  frontier  between  these  worlds  ran  right  across  the  sub- 
continent, though,  rather  than  one  frontier,  the  phenomenon  consisted  of 
a  complex  set  of  frontiers,  frontier  zones,  and  dynamic  "inner  frontiers"  of 
exchange,  intrusion,  and  negotiation  linking  and  holding  together  vast  regions 
bordering  on  them.  In  accepting  this  model,  it  should  be  noted  that,  on  the 
one  hand,  cattle-based  economies  never  existed  independently  from  town 
and  village  markets,  while,  on  the  other  hand,  the  political  management  of 
settled  agriculture  could  not  do  without  alliances  with,  or  appeasement  and 
employment  of,  pastoral  warriors.  On  a  more  local  level,  village  management 
often  depended  on  either  an  annual  exodus  of  seasonal  labour  and  herders  to 
grazing  grounds  during  the  post-harvest  season  or  the  engagement  of  mobile 
frontier  manpower  from  outside  during  the  busiest  months  of  the  year.  Mobile 
labour,  therefore,  did  not  generally  lack  an  agrarian  base  of  some  sort;  neither 
were  villagers  unacquainted  with  faraway  service,  whether  as  weavers,  herd- 
ers, soldiers,  or  agricultural  labourers.  Also,  a  village's  temporary  diaspora 
would,  if  it  appeared  attractive  to  do  so,  lead  to  entire  families  settling  down 
permanently  in  regions  near  or  far.  Landed  communities  would  welcome 
in  their  midst  families  of  relative  strangers  with  their  ploughs  (a  term  for 
a  pair  of  bullocks)  from  either  the  pastoral  or  the  sedentarized  worlds  and 
integrate  them  in  their  systems  of  exchange  of  produce  and  division  of  labour. 
Military  entrepreneurship  by  warlords  often  led  to  agrarian  management 
rights  in  a  number  of  villages  (watari),  mostly  in  or  near  their  home  region, 
being  granted  to  them  and  their  fighting  men.  More  often  than  not,  in  one 


244 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


way  or  another,  soldiering  was  an  activity  directly  or  indirectly  supportive  of 
agrarian  pursuits.1 

This  is  especially  the  case  in  northern  India,  the  part  of  the  subconti- 
nent to  which  my  contribution  restricts  itself,  just  as  the  essay  by  Robert 
Johnson  focuses  on  southern  India.  For  North  India,  it  makes  sense  to 
think  in  terms  of  a  market  for  diasporic  or  mobile  labour  as  an  almost 
autonomous  phenomenon  kept  in  existence  by  the  dynamics  of  the  frontier 
that  linked  the  worlds  of  extensive  agriculture  and  pastoralism,  and  by  the 
demographic  cycles  in  non-capitalist  village  economies  primarily  focusing 
on  production  for  home  consumption.*  That  labour  market,  as  well  as  the 
ecological  exchanges  of  produce  and  animal  husbandry,  played  a  crucial 
role  in  the  survival  strategies  of  peasants  and  cattle  farmers,  always  looking 
for  secure  labour  conditions  under  circumstances  of  unpredictable  harvests 
or  supplies  of  food.  It  had  a  major  impact  on  the  formation  of  patronage 
networks  and  political  entrepreneurship  or  "states"  at  the  regional  and 
local  levels.  The  migratory  and  frontier  cultures  of  India's  villages  and 
regions  constitute  the  great  machine  of  much  of  the  subcontinent's  social 
history.  Neither  can  its  political  history  be  fully  understood  without  taking 
account  of  its  dynamics.  Every  year,  people  would  look  for  new  niches  in 
the  labour  markets  within  their  migratory  reach  on  both  sides  of  the  divide 
between  agriculture  and  cattle  farming,  thus  causing  the  cogwheels  of  the 
great  frontier  machine  to  change  gear  according  to  seasonal  patterns.  The 
intensity  of  the  process  varied  at  different  times  and  in  different  places.  Its 
professional  categories  -  agricultural,  industrial,  commercial,  or  military  - 
were  not  closed  compartments.  Weavers  could  turn  into  peasants  and  vice 
versa;  both  professions  required  a  degree  of  mobility  and,  therefore,  training 
in  the  use  of  arms.  Military  labour  could  be  seasonal  and  dependent  on  a 
surplus  or  deficiency  of  farm  hands  at  home.  Yet,  many  men  spent  decades 
as  professional  soldiers,  most  of  them  never  giving  up  hope  of  one  day 
returning  home  to  their  fields  or  acquiring  an  agrarian  living.  To  keep  such 
options  open  and  thus  to  be  able  to  continue  contributing  to  the  economy 
of  one's  home  villages  or  clan  area  formed  an  essential  part  of  a  migrant's 
culture  of  survival. 

When  considering  how,  in  pre-modern  Indian  history,  states  and  regional 
identities  were  "forged",  the  issue  of  the  management  of  internal  frontiers 
and  labour  markets,  including  the  military  labour  market,  will  always  be 

1  Gommans,  Mughal  Warfare;  for  a  map  of  the  major  ecological  frontiers  see,  p.  n.  On  the 
centrality  of  watan,  see  Gordon,  "Symbolic  and  Structural  Constraints". 

2  See  for  such  economies  Thorner  et  at,  A.V.  Chayanov  on  the  Theory  of  Peasant  Economy. 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


245 


at  the  centre  of  the  analysis.  Taking  as  his  point  of  departure  the  agrarian/ 
pastoralist  order  of  India,  Jos  Gommans  has  turned  on  its  head,  as  it  were, 
our  understanding  of  the  geo-political,  ecological,  and  human-resource 
basis  of  the  Mogul  empire.  Similarly,  in  a  brilliant  recent  book  on  medieval 
Gujarat,  Samira  Sheikh  has  shown  the  explanatory  force  of  a  focus  on  the 
"continually  contested  relationship"  between  the  arid,  largely  pastoralist 
Saurashtra  peninsula  and  the  fertile  agricultural  and  trading  plains  of  the 
eastern  mainland.3 

So,  regional  and  central  state-formation  in  India  was  to  a  large  extent 
(though  perhaps  less  so  e.g.  in  Bengal)  an  effort  to  establish  control  over 
the  dynamics  engendered  by  the  subcontinent's  climatic  and  ecological 
frontiers.  Yet,  historical  experience  seems  to  prove  that  this  regionally 
segmented  military  labour  market  could  not  in  itself  serve  as  a  decisive  base 
for  the  creation  of  a  larger  empire.  In  his  contribution  to  our  project,  Kaushik 
Roy  shows  that,  when  such  empires  nonetheless  came  into  being,  the  initial 
impulse  often  came  from  outside  the  world  of  peasant  and  regionally  based 
soldiering.  During  the  two  periods  of  Indian  empire-building  that  fall  within 
our  time  scheme,  i.e.  those  of  the  Moguls  and  the  British,  India's  pattern 
of  peasant  soldiering  -  i.e.  its  main  market  for  military  labour  -  though 
remaining  intact,  fulfilled  very  different  functions.  Under  the  Moguls,  it 
was  temporarily  suppressed  and  lost  its  prominence  to  non-Indian,  mostly 
tribal  professionals.  This  explains  why,  for  too  long,  as  Stewart  Gordon  has 
argued,  historians  focused  on  the  empire's  mansabdari  (service  nobility) 
system,  thus  neglecting  "the  ordinary,  ongoing  processes  of  military  service 
in  India",  which  often  were  village-based  or  predicated  on  regionally  rooted 
labour  markets.4  The  vitality  of  these  processes  was  clear  again,  when, 
after  a  very  gradual  re-emergence  during  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
centuries,  the  British,  though  thoroughly  reorganizing  it,  embraced  its 
tradition  of  professional  service  and  built  their  Indian  empire  on  it. 

In  the  course  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  military  system  of  the  imperial 
Moguls  was,  as  it  were,  superimposed  on  this  tradition  by  the  Central  Asian 
conqueror  Babur  (in  Delhi  1526-1530)  and  his  grandson  Akbar  (effectively 
1568-1605).  The  core  of  this  system  consisted  of  the  descendants  of  the  old 
Turkic  and  Mongol  nomadic  warriors  from  the  deep  steppe  who  were  born 

3  Gommans,  Mughal  Warfare;  Sheikh,  Forging  a  Region,  p.  19.  An  example  of  an  even  smaller- 
scale  frontier  is  that  between  the  khadar  flood-prone  lowlands  and  the  bangar  uplands  of  the 
Upper  (Ganga-Yamuna)  Doab,  the  management  of  which  formed  the  basis  of  the  eighteenth- 
century  Gujar  states  in  the  area.  See  Kolff,  Grass  in  Their  Mouths,  pp.  471-477. 

4  Gordon,  "Symbolic  and  Structural  Constraints",  p.  159. 


246 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


and  raised  as  horse-breeders,  and  trained  from  early  childhood  as  mounted 
archers  and  raiders  in  Central  Asia.5  Provided  they  were  accompanied  by 
cannon,  musketry,  and  heavy  cavalry,  this  arm  of  light  cavalry  with  their 
composite  bows  fired  from  the  saddle  and  their  stunningly  swift  horseman- 
ship was  irresistible  on  the  battlefields  of  North  India  and  indispensable 
for  those  striving  for  empire  at  the  time.6 

Demography,  technology,  and  invasion,  in  short,  were  the  main  deter- 
minants of  the  role  of  military  labour  in  post-1500  India.  The  vicissitudes  of 
empire  continued  to  have  a  bearing  on  the  character  and  military  impact 
of  frontier-based  peasant  recruitment  and  service.  During  the  sixteenth 
century,  mounted  archers  still  contributed  in  a  decisive  manner  to  the 
conquests  of  the  Moguls  in  North  India.  With  more  success  than  some  of 
his  predecessors,  Akbar  overlaid  this  system  on  the  tradition  of  peasant 
soldiering  of  Hindustan,  the  central  part  of  the  great  alluvial  plain  of  North 
India.  My  essay  focuses  on  this  tradition  and  I  will  try  to  show  how,  under 
different  guises,  it  remained  a  constant  force  in  medieval  and  early  modern 
Indian  history.  Its  dynamics  continued  to  an  important  degree  to  be  fed 
by  the  survival  strategies  of  a  peasantry  that  was  compelled  to  contend 
with  the  exceptional  vagaries  of  the  monsoon  as  it  manifests  itself  north 
of  the  Tropic  of  Cancer.  As  always,  peasants  responded  to  the  insecurity 
of  harvests  by  investing  in  non-agricultural  pursuits  such  as  soldiering. 
This  kind  of  soldiering  was,  in  other  words,  a  voluntary  one,  energized  in  a 
bottom-up  manner  by  a  demand  for  a  source  of  non-agrarian  income  that 
would  spread  one's  risks  and  underpin  an  economy  based  on  inherently  un- 
stable family  farms.  In  a  characteristically  Indian  way,  the  entrepreneurship 
of  brokers  who  were  in  a  position  to  negotiate  deals  with  distant  warlords 
and  thrones,  whether  they  were  clan  leaders  or  independently  operating 
jobber-commanders,  so-called jamadars,  was  crucial  in  the  process.7 

The  Mogul  system,  therefore,  was  a  complex  one.  It  was,  moreover,  not  an 
unchanging  one,  if  only  because  the  Indian  enemies  of  the  empire  adopted 
some  of  its  techniques,  even  mounted  archery,  though  a  less  thoroughly 
trained  version  of  it,  and  found  answers  to  the  challenges  it  posed.  Mean- 
while, the  supply  of  accomplished  archers  from  the  Central  Asian  steppes 
came  almost  to  a  halt.  Other  weapons  came  to  the  fore.  During  the  sixteenth 

5  On  the  technique  of  horse  and  bow  and  their  effect  in  battle,  see  Hildinger,  Warriors  of  the 
Steppe,  pp.  15-32;  on  the  coherence  of  the  Mongol  system,  see  May,  The  Mongol  Art  of  War. 

6  For  Mogul  military  superiority  in  India,  see  Streusand,  The  Formation  of  the  Mughal  Empire, 
pp.  51-69. 

7  The jamadars  can  be  seen  as  performing  the  characteristically  India  function  of  dalali,  the 
Indian  term  for  brokerage  in  its  widest  sense. 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


247 


century,  Mogul  artillery  arsenals  developed  and  grew.  The  fighting  reputa- 
tion of  musketeers  improved  as  the  accuracy  of  their  fire  increased;  they 
became  a  valuable  tool  in  the  hands  of  the  central  state.  Already  under 
Akbar,  attempts  were  made  to  keep  expert  units  of  foot-musketeers  under 
strict  central  control  and  keep  them  away  from  the  nobles.  Then,  gradually, 
the  broad-based  North  Indian  military  labour  market  -  its  demographic 
resources  so  much  richer  than  those  of  the  steppes  -  reasserted  itself  and 
re-emerged  as  a  vital  resource  of  the  state,  even  of  the  empire.  During 
Jahangir's  reign  (1605-1627)  Hindustani  peasant  infantry  became  strikingly 
visible  again  in  the  sources. 

At  that  time,  those  available  for  longer  or  shorter  periods  for  employ- 
ment as  foot-soldiers  in  the  military  labour  markets  of  the  subcontinent, 
whether  all-India,  regional  or  local,  cannot  have  represented  less  than  10 
per  cent  of  the  adult  male  population.  It  was  clear  that  the  empire  would 
not  have  the  means  to  employ  a  sufficient  number  of  these  units  and  to 
disarm  the  rest.8  Crucial  in  this  respect  was  the  increasing  dissemination 
of  the  comparatively  affordable  matchlock  among  groups  of  professional 
foot-archers  and  many  other  communities  of  armed  peasants.  This  phenom- 
enon could  not  but  weaken  imperial  control  over  North  India,  especially 
in  the  central  part  of  it,  Hindustan.  Though  men  armed  with  swords  and 
shields  successfully  continued  to  offer  themselves  for  hire,  many  villagers 
equipped  themselves  with  firearms,  resulting  in  a  newly  vibrant  labour 
market  for  peasantry-based  infantry.  The  empire  never  found  an  answer  to 
the  challenges  it  posed.  It  has  been  suggested  that  the  segmentary  nature 
of  Mogul  military  organization  and  its  policy  of  delegating  authority  to 
employer-noblemen  called  mansabdars,  hampered  the  "formation  of  a 
kind  of  army  in  which  arms  of  musketeers  and  artillery  were  given  their 
due",  and  that  a  large-scale  adoption  of  the  flintlock  -  which  could  not,  as 
the  matchlock  was,  be  manufactured  by  village  blacksmiths  -  would  have 
been  possible  only  when  the  empire  itself  had  taken  up  the  production  of 
superior  firearms.  Technology,  however,  stagnated,  while  attempts  by  the 
Mogul  court  to  prevent  local  blacksmiths  from  making  muskets  were  late 
and  failed.9  The  massive  presence  of  firearms  in  the  villages  turned  the 

8  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  p.  3. 

9  M.  Athar  Ali,  The  Mughal  Nobility  Under  Aurangzeb,  rev.  edn  (Delhi,  1997),  p.  xx,  cited 
by  Khan,  Gunpowder  and  Firearms,  p.  155.  On  the  importance  of  the  "segmented  structure 
of  political  control  which  favoured  military  units  which,  in  terms  of  command  and  control, 
approximated  to  war  bands  rather  than  to  a  disciplined  army"  in  India,  see  Wickremesekera, 
"Best Black  Troops  in  the  World",  p.  34. 


248 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


agrarian  crises  of  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth  century  into  as  many 
explosive  challenges  to  the  empire. 

So,  as  after  the  reign  of  Akbar,  matchlocks  spread  in  the  countryside,  and 
the  conditions  for  the  development  of  an  imperial  army  equipped  with  flint- 
locks and  cast-iron  cannon,  which  would  have  kept  the  Moguls  in  control, 
remained  unfulfilled.  It  was  only  during  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth 
century  that  several  of  the  Indian  regional  rulers  established  foundries 
capable  of  producing  cast-iron  guns.  Some  also  began  using  flintlocks 
and  hired  European  officers  to  command  battalions  thus  equipped  and 
trained,  a  development  that  has  been  said  to  represent  an  "Indian  military 
revolution".10  But,  as  Iqtidar  Alam  Khan  writes,  it  was  not  enough:  "in  the 
absence  of  a  concerted  drive  to  modernize  the  entire  army  organization", 
it  did  not  prevent  the  formation,  by  another  outsider,  the  British  East  India 
Company,  of  another  Indian  empire.  This  new  empire,  however,  unlike  the 
Mogul  one,  was  predominantly  based  on  the  indigenous  agrarian  labour 
market  of  North  India  and  on  the  Company's  drive  towards  a  degree  of 
organization,  technological  advance,  and  discipline  that  the  Moguls  had 
not  been  able  to  achieve.11 

Long  before  the  British  conquests,  therefore,  military  initiative  had 
shifted  from  the  Mogul  mansabdars  to  patrons,  political  entrepreneurs, 
and  jobber-commanders  with  close  and  efficient  links  to  the  supplies  of 
peasant  labour  in  the  central  provinces  of  the  empire.  In  due  course,  the 
crucial  brokerage  and  recruitment  of  peasant  soldiers  from  the  core  region 
of  Hindustan,  which  had,  in  a  number  of  cases,  been  handled  by  clan  leaders 
with  both  local  roots  and  strong  links  with  the  emperor,  came  into  the 
hands  of  numberless  independently  operating  jobbers  (jamadars)  with 
strong  local  links  and  great  freedom  of  negotiating  their  terms  of  service. 
The  increasing  monetization  of  the  economy  may  have  had  a  certain  role 
in  the  process,  though  the  circulation  of  silver  was  already  significant  in 
Akbar's  time. 

Especially  in  Hindustan,  the  demographic  factor  of  the  dynamics  and  the 
almost  limitless  supply  of  armed  peasants,  as  demonstrated  in  a  frightening 
manner  by  the  late  sixteenth-century  military  census  ordered  by  Akbar, 
had  a  decisive  role  in  the  slow  loss  of  grip  and  initiative  of  the  Moguls.  But 
not  only  there.  Further  south,  in  Malwa  and  in  Deccan,  in  the  seventeenth 
and  eighteenth  centuries,  as  Gordon  has  shown,  village  and  regionally  based 

10    Wickremesekera,  "Best  Black  Troops  in  the  World",  p.  66. 

n  For  the  ideas  set  out  in  the  preceding  three  paragraphs,  see  especially  Khan,  Gunpowder 
and  Firearms,  pp.  143-199. 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


249 


troops  of  cavalry  in  search  of  patronage,  watan,  and  pay  represented  a  fight- 
ing tradition  that  similarly  continued  as  a  high-prestige,  high-pay  branch 
of  military  service,  entirely  independent  of  the  Mogul  and  Turkic  cavalry 
tradition.  The  case  proves  abundantly  that  by  no  means  all  agrarian-based 
military  service  took  the  form  of  foot-soldiering.12  Even  in  North  India, 
this  was  not  the  case.  Yet,  in  this  essay,  partly  because  it  will  allow  me  to 
carry  the  story  into  the  British  period,  I  will  stick  to  North  India  and,  more 
specifically,  to  the  example  of  Hindustani  infantrymen. 

Families  rooted  in  (semi-)pastoral  India,  like  nomads  elsewhere,  were,  as 
noted,  compelled  to  adopt  flexible  survival  strategies.  Baluchi  cameleers,  for 
instance,  found  employment  as  armed  guards  with  caravan  leaders  on  the 
main  Gujarat-to-Hindustan  routes.  Many  of  them  were  archers,  although 
some  had  swords  and  acquired  firearms  at  an  early  stage.  One  seventeenth- 
century  European  observer  found  them  an  unruly  lot  and  warned  against 
engaging  Baluchis  and  Jats  simultaneously  as  one's  protectors,  as  they  would 
tend  to  attack  each  other  instead  of  working  together.  Another  found  that  in 
the  Gujarati  diaspora  and  towards  Agra  there  were  many  honest  men  among 
them.  For  travellers,  they  were  essential.  They  cost  3.5  rupees  a  month; 
their  leaders,  styled  muqaddam  (a  term  also  used  for  village  leaders)  or 
mirdah,  received  4  rupees  and  travelled  with  their  men.  Not  only  did  they 
conduct  caravans:  between  Gujarat  and  Hindustan,  almost  anyjourney  was 
inconceivable  without  them.  Bands  of  them  were  easily  hired  in  towns  or 
qasbas  (market  towns)  along  the  road.  There  they  had  labour  agents  who 
answered  for  their  honesty  and  received  1  rupee  for  each  contracted  man.  As 
others  with  pastoralist  origins  did,  many  of  them  joined  the  regional  military 
labour  market  of  Gujarat  under  the  denomination  of  qasbatis  (townsmen) 
and,  it  appears,  acquired  some  land.  The  Mirdt-i  Ahmadi  says  about  their 
activities  in  the  service  of  the  province  of  Gujarat  in  the  eighteenth  century: 

They  attacked  villages,  drove  away  cattle,  escorted  Mughal  officials, 
took  responsibility  of  collecting  tribute  from  landholders  on  a  small 
salary,  they  got  enlisted  as  recruits  in  the  army  for  a  few  days,  served 
the  chiefs  and  inspectors  of  the  district  police. 

Generally  reluctant  to  serve  outside  Gujarat,  some  of  them  nevertheless 
tried  their  luck  in  other  provinces  and  "made  bravery  their  profession".13 
Direct  employment  by  the  empire  could  lead  to  the  grant  of  land,  even 

12  Gordon,  "Symbolic  and  Structural  Constraints". 

13  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  pp.  4-6. 


250 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


of  entire  villages.  Aurangzeb,  for  instance,  gave  nine  villages  in  the  old 
Saharanpur  district  north  of  Delhi  to  a  number  of  such  Baluchis  on  the 
condition  that  they  exterminate  the  numerous  highway  robbers  in  that 
part  of  the  country.  This  made  sense.  Safety  on  the  roads  had  all  alongbeen 
their  speciality.  Here,  in  Saharanpur,  they  remained  powerful  throughout 
the  eighteenth  century  and,  when  the  East  India  Company  took  over  the 
Upper  Doab  from  the  Marathas,  the  land  revenue  of  the  villages  concerned 
was  settled  with  the  Baluchi  chiefs.14  The  pattern  was  a  common  one.  Clans 
must,  writes  Sheikh,  often  be  seen  "in  terms  of  their  changing  occupations". 
"Groups  that  entered  Gujarat  as  pastoralists  could  settle  down  to  become 
cultivators  while  small  bands  of  forest-dwelling  cultivators  could  achieve 
military  successes  and  become  chieftains."15 

The  above  case  of  the  Baluchis,  who,  apparently,  offered  their  labour 
in  a  purely  free  and  commodified  form,  may  serve  as  an  example  of  the 
social  and  spatial  mobility  that  was  typical  of  North  India  in  the  early 
modern  period  and  in  which  the  military  labour  market  played  such  a 
dynamic  role.  The  military  entrepreneurship  of  the  Baluchis  -  who  turned 
into  travel  guards,  then  town-based  fighters,  regional  and  imperial  profes- 
sional soldiers,  landowners-cum-policemen,  and  finally  village  managers 
in  British-ruled  India  -  is  just  an  illustration  of  the  kind  of  flexible  oc- 
cupational genealogy  Sheikh  draws  attention  to.  It  is  important  to  note 
that,  as  the  quote  from  the  Mirdt-iAhmadi  showed,  the  military  culture  of 
these  groups  of  men  was  always  one  of  negotiation  and  of  keeping  several 
options  for  economic  survival  open.  This  attribute  would,  over  the  centuries, 
remain  a  distinguishing  feature  of  the  political  culture  of  North  India, 
where,  more  than  in  western  Europe,  the  climate,  i.e.  the  monsoon,  was 
fickle  and  harvests  unpredictable.  One  hesitates,  however,  to  label  these 
pastoralists  looking  for  watan,  on  the  basis  of  their  continuous  search  for 
the  best  terms  of  service  and  employment,  as  "mercenaries",  which  is  a  term 
that  seems  to  have  little  meaning  before  the  age  of  nationalist  politics  and 
the  love  of  a  "fatherland". 

There  were,  especially  in  the  world  of  settled  agriculture,  many  instances 
in  which  peasants,  though  as  skilled  in  the  use  of  arms  as  most  life-long 
soldiers  and,  therefore,  fit  to  move  and  enter  the  all-India  labour  market, 
were  never  under  the  necessity  to  leave  home  for  long  periods  or  fight  over 
other  than  local  issues.  Local  issues  there  were  many.  It  was  impossible 

14  F.C.  Smith,  Mag.  Saharanpur,  to  Sadr  Nizamat  Adalat,  4.3.1824;  Bengal  Criminal  Judicial 
Proceedings,  Western  Provinces,  13.10.1825  no.  13,  reply  paras  569-594. 

15  Sheikh,  Forging  a  Region,  p.  104. 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


251 


to  retain  the  respect  of  and  to  keep  going  the  negotiations  with  armed 
travellers,  hostile  neighbours,  or  the  representatives  of  government  itself 
without  a  readiness  to  risk  armed  conflict.  When,  in  1717,  a  Dutch  East 
India  Company  caravan  was  attacked  in  Malwa  by  2,000  people  armed  with 
muskets  and  3,000  others,  the  Dutch  merchant  in  charge  described  these 
men  as  "peasants".  Soldiers  employed  by  traders  often  plundered  along  the 
way.  In  this  case,  it  seems,  the  suffering  villagers  responded  to  such  acts  of 
violence  by  staging  a  looting  counter-offensive  of  their  own.  In  1632,  men 
working  the  fields  near  Kanpur  in  Hindustan  did  so  with  their  guns,  swords, 
and  shields  lying  nearby,  because  they  were  at  variance  with  the  people  of 
a  town  half  a  mile  away.  And  around  1650  in  the  nearby  Agra  area,  where 
every  village  had  a  small  fort,  semi-rebellion  was  endemic.  The  ploughmen 
kept  a  musket  slung  on  their  back  and  a  powder  pouch  at  their  waist.  It  was 
the  heyday  of  empire.  Yet,  the  landowners  never  paid  revenue  without  a 
fight.  Their  strong  negotiating  position  vis-a-vis  the  local  governor  enabled 
them  to  have  the  relief  loans  (taqavi)  they  received  from  him  after  a  bad 
harvest  converted  into  supplies  of  lead  and  gunpowder.  But  even  without 
the  threatening  presence  of  hostile  outsiders,  carefully  measured  dosages 
of  violence  were  a  necessary  part  of  agrarian  management.  Armed  gangs  of 
rural  stakeholders  were  a  phenomenon  inseparable  from  the  country  scene. 

The  martial  skills  of  these  men  were  essential  survival  tools,  however, 
in  other  than  strictly  local  circumstances.  In  combination  with  forms  of 
small-scale  migration,  the  use  of  force  was  often  an  integral  part  of  the  an- 
nual agrarian  cycle.  Seasonal  soldiering  or  looting  enabled  quite  a  number 
of  people  in  town  and  countryside  to  survive  the  slack  agricultural  season. 
In  August  1636,  soon  after  the  onset  of  the  monsoon,  partly  because  the 
rains  made  the  roads  impassable,  plundering  ceased  on  the  roads  of  Gujarat; 
the  peasants  returned  to  their  fields.  Similarly,  the  weavers  of  the  town  of 
Baroda  in  the  1620s,  who  were  generally  at  home  during  the  rainy  season, 
went  to  serve  in  the  provincial  army  in  the  dry  months  of  the  year.  In  times 
of  dearth  or  famine,  this  occupational  and  spatial  mobility  of  labour  was  the 
rule  rather  than  the  exception  and  must  have  saved  many  lives.  No  doubt, 
most  of  these  men  were  fit  to  enter  the  regional  or  all-India  military  labour 
markets.  Yet  only  a  limited  number  of  them  did  so.16 

More  often  than  not,  rather  than  offering  their  services  to  one  of  the 
states  in  their  region,  they  confronted  them.  It  is  striking  how  frequently 
we  hear  of  village  soldiers  attacking  state  soldiers.  Whenever  the  risks 

16  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  pp.  4f£,  16.  For  some  more  examples,  see  Khan,  Gunpowder 
and  Firearms,  pp.  178-180. 


252 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


seemed  worth  taking,  peasants  resisted  and  fell  on  intruders  who,  from 
their  point  of  view,  were  mere  mercenaries,  though  perhaps  they  had  an 
agrarian  base  somewhere  far  away  just  as  they  themselves  had  one  nearby. 
They  attacked  army  units  campaigning  far  from  their  barracks,  and  fugitive 
soldiers  making  their  way  from  a  battlefield.  In  the  latter  case,  great  loot 
often  fell  into  the  villagers'  hands.  Thus,  in  the  early  sixteenth  century,  the 
great  Rana  Sanga's  camp  was  once  plundered  by  villagers  in  the  Agra  area. 
And  after  Sultan  Khusru,  Akbar's  son,  had  been  defeated  in  the  Punjab  in 
1606,  peasants  killed  most  of  the  leaderless  soldiers  they  could  lay  their 
hands  on  and  captured  all  the  prince's  horses,  camels,  and  other  animals. 
There  are  examples  of  villagers  closing  their  market  to  units  of  the  imperial 
army  or  defending  local  merchants  badly  treated  by  their  governor.  The 
sources  mention  dozens  of  such  instances.  On  a  battlefield,  peasants  could 
even  be  a  significant  factor  without  being  recruited  by  either  side.  During 
his  years  in  India  early  in  the  nineteenth  century,  Arthur  Wellesley  had 
learned  that,  if  you  moved  after  your  enemy  with  "celerity"  and  sufficiently 
distressed  him,  armed  peasants  could  help  you  a  great  deal.  "Whenever  the 
largest  and  most  formidable  bodies  of  [freebooters]  are  hard  pressed  by  our 
troops,  the  village  people  attack  them  upon  their  rear  and  flanks,  cut  off 
stragglers,  and  will  not  allow  a  man  to  enter  their  villages."17 

In  principle,  of  course,  these  men  were  martial  and  mobile  enough 
to  make  fighting  their  entire  living.  During  Akbar's  siege  of  Chittor  in 
Rajasthan  in  1568,  the  fort  was  defended,  Abu'l  Fazl  says,  by  8,000  Rajput 
warriors  and  some  40,000  peasants  who  showed  "great  zeal  and  activity". 
This  widespread  participation  in  the  resistance  against  Akbar's  aggression 
made  him,  according  to  the  same  source,  decide  to  have  nearly  30,000  of 
the  defenders  killed  on  the  day  the  fortress  fell,  which  he  would  not  have 
done,  one  assumes,  if  he  had  thought  them  a  negligible  military  presence.18 
These  people  were  fit  for  service  almost  everywhere.  When  the  rains  and 
harvests  failed,  in  cases  of  flood  or  unbearable  devastations  of  war,  many 
would  leave  their  homes  and  look  for  work,  whether  weaving,  ploughing, 
or  military,  wherever  there  was  food  and  a  demand  for  their  services.  In 
more  or  less  normal  years,  on  the  other  hand,  the  range  of  mobility  of  the 
sedentarized  part  of  the  people  remained  limited  in  practice,  even  though 
some  of  the  young  men,  hearing  of  great  prizes  being  won  by  others  in 
faraway  lands,  felt  a  pull  to  leave  and  try  their  luck.  For  most  of  them, 


17  James,  Wellington  at  War  1794-1815,  p.  103. 

18  See  Kolff,  "Chittor". 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


253 


however,  the  issue  of  whether  to  serve  any  other  leaders  than  their  own 
local  or  regional  clansmen  did  not  arise.  Why  was  this  so? 

The  reason  was  that  without  intermediary  agency  most  armed  peasants 
had  no  access  to  military  service  at  the  level  of  the  great  regional  states 
or  at  that  of  the  empire.  And  successful  agency  was  rare.  The  survival 
strategies  of  the  state  -  whether  that  of  the  Moguls,  their  rivals,  or  their 
predecessors  -  and  that  of  the  peasantries  seemed  mutually  antagonistic. 
Confrontation  was  the  rule.  There  are  instances  where  that  confrontation 
induced  a  kind  of  migration  or  diaspora  of  its  own.  In  Hindustan,  the  great 
fertile  region  between  the  Punjab  and  Bengal  dominated  by  the  rivers  Ganga 
and  Yamuna  that  constituted  the  core  of  the  market  for  peasant  military 
labour  in  India,  the  encounter  of  the  peasantry  and  the  state  exacerbated 
during  the  1620s  and  1630s  and  led  to  regular  enslavement,  deportation,  and 
extermination.  It  is  reported  that  Abdullah  Khan  Firuz  Jang,  then  in  charge 
of  the  Kalpi-Kanauj  region,  defeated  all  the  hitherto  unsubdued  Chauhan 
rajas  and  rebels  there,  had  the  leaders  beheaded,  and  the  peasants'  wives, 
daughters,  and  children,  some  200,000  of  them,  transported  to  Iran  and  sold 
there.  Abdullah  Khan  himself  boasted  he  had  sold  half  a  million  women  and 
men.  Large  numbers  of  them,  also  from  other  areas,  were  deported  across 
the  Indus,  while  Afghans  were  forced,  though  not  as  slaves,  to  move  in  the 
other  direction  to  the  plains.  Certainly,  Abdullah  Khan  was  more  given  to 
tyrannical  methods  of  pacification  than  most  of  his  contemporaries.  But 
the  spirit  of  resistance  to  taxation  of  many  peasant  communities  in  the 
strategic  or  core  areas  of  state-building  convinced  not  a  few  rulers  that 
only  desperately  stern  measures  would  work.  Another  aspect  of  this  is  the 
urgent  demand  for  peasants  and  artisans  in  Iran  and  Central  Asia,  where 
many  of  those  deported  by  the  state  must  have  been  employed,  as  were 
the  120  slaves  -  tillers  of  grain,  diggers  of  canals  for  irrigation,  bronze  and 
metal  workers,  a  potter,  a  cook,  a  tinker,  and  a  bowl  maker,  "fathers,  sons 
and  grandsons  [...]  all  Hindustanis",  who  were  employed  on  an  estate  near 
Bukhara  towards  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century.19 

Such  attempts  to  smother  the  martial  energies  of  semi-pastoral  agrar- 
ian Hindustan  could  give  only  temporary  relief  to  the  imperial  rulers  of 
the  alluvial  plains.  If  the  Mogul  empire  was  aiming  to  transform  itself 
according  to  "early  modern"  military-fiscalist  principles,  which  it  did  to 
an  extent,  the  systematic  deportation  of  potential  taxpayers  would  have 
been  an  irrational  policy.  But  any  other  attempt  at  actually  disarming  the 

19  Chekhovich,  Samarkandskie  dokumenti,  XV-XVIvv,  pp.  172,  233-234;  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput 
&  Sepoy,  pp.  i2ff. 


254 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


countryside  would,  as  we  saw,  be  equally  impractical.  Only  the  British 
Company  would,  in  the  1798  to  1818  period,  achieve  something  approaching 
the  demilitarization,  though  not  the  disarmament,  of  its  Indian  territories. 
The  Mogul  empire,  in  other  words,  never  adequately  overcame  the  problem 
of  its  being  faced  not  with  just  recalcitrant  individual  landholders,  but  also 
with  armed  peasantries  that  represented  the  backbone  of  society  and  could 
not  be  destroyed  without  dire  consequences  to  the  agrarian  productivity 
on  which  the  regime  depended  for  its  survival. 

Another  course  open  to  state-builders  was  to  selectively  seek  alliances  in 
the  evolving  world  of  pastoralist  warlords  and  to  invite  to  military  service 
some  of  the  migrant  bands  of  warriors  in  search  of  patronage  and  marriage 
such  as  were  always  active  on  the  borders  of  settled  agriculture.20  In  return 
for  local  revenues  they  could  be  entrusted  with  the  pacification  of  turbulent 
territory,  so  that,  if  successful,  they  would  have  the  choice  of  opting  for  a 
sedentary  way  of  life.  A  provincial  Mogul  force,  sent  against  uncooperative 
taxpayers  in  Gujarat  in  1684,  included  "a  numberless  multitude  of  men  of 
the  country,  consisting  of  Grasiyas  and  Kolis,  who  are  tillers  of  the  soil  but 
follow  the  army  by  command  in  exchange  for  freedom  of  tribute;  as  they 
receive  nothing  for  food,  they  keep  themselves  going  mostly  by  theft".  To 
the  state,  the  local  knowledge  of  such  men  was  valuable;  they  were  also 
cheap.  But  their  looting  for  a  living  could  do  more  harm  than  good.  They 
certainly  partook  of  the  quality  that  marginal  people  generally  have  from 
a  military  point  of  view:  semi-pastoralist  robbers  and  men  from  the  hills 
and  forests  make  excellent  skirmishers  against  similar  types  of  fighters. 
Though  alliances  with  such  groups  were  part  of  one  of  the  central  aspects 
of  state  formation,  namely  the  effort  to  establish  control  over  the  dynamics 
of  the  major  ecological  frontiers,  these  men  might  not  easily  be  turned  into 
units  sufficiently  dependable  for  use  on  a  major  battlefield.  Nonetheless, 
such  men  were  often  enlisted  and  proved  useful. 

As  hinted  at,  there  were  yet  other  strategies  open  to  men  who  aspired 
to  build  an  early  modern  territorial  polity.  There  was  indeed  no  way  the 
Mogul  government  could  do  without  the  help  of  Indian  chiefs  and  patrons, 
especially  those  with  access  to  units  of  peasant  fighters.  It  was  crucially 
important  to  find  the  right  agency  that  enabled  the  recruitment  as  infantry 
from  the  peasantries  of  a  significant  and  well-selected  number  of  those  one 
could  not  otherwise  control.  This  policy  was  successful  to  an  extent.  Before 
and  during  the  late  seventeenth-century  "agrarian  crisis"  of  North  India 
that  would  to  a  large  extent  be  induced  by  increasing  state  oppression  and 


20   Ziegler,  "Marvari  Historical  Chronicles". 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


255 


agrarian  overtaxation  and  would,  in  Irfan  Habib's  words,  render  the  Mogul 
dynasty,  at  least  partly,  "its  own  grave-digger",  the  empire  co-opted  some 
of  the  best  managed  resources  of  the  armed  peasantry.21 

From  early  on,  an  important  role  was  played  in  Mogul  armies  by  semi- 
migratory  professional  peasant  soldiers,  often  under  the  command  of  their 
own  zamindars  (agrarian  territorial  managers).22  Akbar's  famous  military 
census  of  the  realm  dating  from  the  1590s  resulted  in  the  registration  of  a 
staggering  4  million  armed  zamindars'  foot-soldiers.  This  inventory  of  North 
India's  military  labour  market  betrays  the  empire's  uneasy  awareness  of  the 
impossibility  of  controlling  its  peasants  or  employing  more  than  a  fraction 
of  them.23  The  phenomenon  of  a  state  aspiring  to  a  monopoly  over  the  instru- 
ments of  coercion  on  its  territory  is  foreign  to  Indian  history.  The  negotiating 
position  of  some  of  the  leaders  of  these  village-based  infantrymen  was 
generally  far  stronger  than  that  of  their  contemporaries  in  Europe.  The 
imperial  officers  were  not  entirely  free  to  recruit  whom  they  wished.  Many 
in  the  end  were  employed  thanks  to  the  crucial  agency  of  lineage  leaders 
and,  later,  a  category  of  men  called  jamadars:  men  to  whom  the  common 
soldier  was  far  more  loyal  than  to  the  states  that  had  contracted  him. 

Let  me  elaborate  on  this  theme  with  respect  to  the  most  striking  example 
of  it  that  can  be  found,  the  recruitment  history  of  the  Avadhi-  and  Bhojpuri- 
(Hindi  dialects)  speaking  part  of  Hindustan  (now  eastern  Uttar  Pradesh  and 
western  Bihar),  a  little  to  the  east  of  the  part  of  North  India  where  Abdullah 
Khan  performed  his  police  atrocities.  The  phenomenon  of  how  for  many 
centuries  the  peasants  of  this  region  maintained  their  hold  on  the  military 
profession  in  North  India  and  turned  soldiering  into  a  major  tool  of  their  sur- 
vival represents  a  major,  though  not  the  only,  chapter  of  the  military  history 
of  India  in  the  early  modern  period.  Other  features  of  that  history,  especially 
the  apparatus  set  up  by  the  Moguls  to  achieve  a  measure  of  control  over  North 
India's  military  labour  market,  are  discussed  by  Kaushik  Roy  in  this  volume. 

The  soldiering  tradition  of  Hindustan  was  kept  alive  by  its  peasantries  for 
almost  four  centuries,  its  village  leaders  tenaciously  guarding  their  position 
as  a  recruitment  area  for  the  best-rewarded  units  of  infantry  in  North  India. 
As  a  tradition  of  peasant  soldiering,  it  is  traceable  at  least  to  the  fifteenth- 

21  Habib,  The  Agrarian  System  of  Mughal  India,  pp.  364-405.  Habib  here  shows  how,  paradoxically, 
the  agrarian  collapse  of  the  empire  was  to  a  significant  extent  caused  by  the  extractive  opportuni- 
ties offered  to  its  centrally  managed  official  elite,  the  mansabdari  "apparatus",  of  the  empire,  the 
organization  of  which  was,  in  itself,  one  of  the  great  achievements  of  the  Mogul  leadership. 

22  For  a  definition  of  the  term  zamindar,  see  Habib,  The  Agrarian  System  of  Mughal  India, 
pp.  384-389. 

23  'Allami,  The  A'in-i Akbari,  II,  pp.  141-367.  See  also  n.  7. 


256 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


century  Sharqi  sultanate  of  Jaunpur.  Many  Rajput,  i.e.  warrior-clan,  vassals 
of  this  realm  served  the  Sharqi  sultans  with  their  peasant  war  bands.  There 
is  evidence  of  close  alliances  between  the  sultans  of  this  period,  Sharqis 
and  others,  and  their  Rajput  warlords.  Such  alliances  were  not  necessarily 
of  an  unequal  nature.  In  terms  of  the  taxonomy  of  our  project,  they  partake 
of  the  quality  of  reciprocity.  Just  as  Rajput  women  occupied  an  honourable 
place  in  the  sultans'  seraglios,  Rajput  alliances  with  Muslim  women  and 
their  presence  in  Rajput  royal  households  were  considered  regular.  Women 
acted  as  the  seal  on  and  as  proof  of  the  intimacy  and  sacredness  of  these 
Hindu-Muslim  alliances.  After  the  sultans  lost  control  of  Jaunpur  to  the 
Lodi  Afghans  of  Delhi  in  the  1480s,  a  clan  of  local  Rajputs  spearheaded  an 
insurrection  in  support  of  this  "reciprocal"  and  "intercommunal"  tradition 
of  alliance-formation.  In  the  rising,  200,000  or  even  300,000  Hindustani 
footsoldiers  are  reported  to  have  participated:  inflated  figures  no  doubt, 
but,  compared  to  the  15,000  horsemen  the  source  mentions,  clearly  convey- 
ing the  impression  of  enormous  manpower  originating  with  the  regional 
landholders  and  their  peasantries.24 

Perhaps  because  the  subsequent  failure  of  the  rising  and  the  conquest  of 
Hindustan  by  the  Lodis  reduced  their  chances  of  military  employment  in 
their  own  region,  and  possibly  even  before  the  Lodis  put  an  end  to  the  Jaunpur 
sultanate,25  many  of  these  levies  moved  west  and  south  in  search  of  naukari, 
the  term  then  and  later  used  for  the  honourable  service  of  roaming  warriors. 
These  migrating  professionals  proved  to  be  in  great  demand.  They  facilitated 
the  renewal  of  the  splendour  of  the  royal  Tomar  Rajput  court  at  Gwaliyar,  as 
well  as  of  the  Muslim  courts  in  Malwa  and  elsewhere  in  Central  India.  The 
generic  term  used  for  these  soldiers,  "Purbiya",  not  only  indicates  a  non-ethnic, 
geographical  origin  from  the  eastward  (Purab,  i.e.  Hindustan,  the  country 
east  of  Delhi);  it  also  came  to  define  a  migratory  soldiering  identity  of  its  own, 
an  identity  that  implied  the  ability  of  those  representing  it  to  contract  royal 
patronage  in  a  labour  market  that  extended  far  beyond  their  home  region. 

After  the  collapse  of  its  fortunes  under  the  Tomars,  the  Purbiya  tradition 
of  naukari  marketed,  so  to  say,  its  next  incarnation  or  soldiers'  identity. 
It  was  introduced  to  the  North  Indian  military  labour  market  under  a 
more  distinct  brand  name  than  that  of  Purbiya,  namely  that  of  Ujjainiya. 
The  leaders  of  the  Ujjainiya  clan  were  zamindars,  or  territorial  lords,  of 
Bhojpur  in  the  southwest  of  Bihar.  They  now  assumed  the  role  of  recruit- 

24  Saeed,  The  Sharqi  Sultanate  of  Jaunpur,  pp.  101-107;  Niamatullah,  Niamatullah's  History  of 
the  Afghans,  Part  I,  pp.  72-73, 136-140. 

25  See  for  this  discussion  Khan,  Gunpowder  and  Firearms,  pp.  218-226. 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


257 


ing  captains  in  a  grand  way  and  with  their  war  bands  began  to  compete 
in  the  supra-local  market  for  expert  fighting  units.  By  the  Rajputs  of  the 
west  of  India,  especially  those  in  the  region  later  called  Rajputana,  the 
Ujjainiyas  would,  along  with  most  other  clans  in  Hindustan,  be  considered 
genealogically  "spurious",  that  is,  not  of  pure  lineage  and  therefore  unfit  as 
marriage  partners.  And,  it  is  true,  their  strength  lay  elsewhere.  During  the 
first  decades  of  the  sixteenth  century,  they  made  themselves  indispensable 
as  specialized  recruiting  agents  and  commanders  of  Purbiyas.  The  role  of  the 
clan  in  marketing  the  services  not  only  of  their  own  men,  but  also  of  all  those 
associated  with  the  old  Purbiya  recruitment  tradition,  in  negotiating  for 
them  their  conditions  of  employment  and  in  leading  them  in  the  field  was 
a  cardinal  one  and  explains  how  the  name  Ujjainiya  became  the  trademark 
and  identity  of  the  men  they  led.  The  great  reputation  these  units  acquired 
with  the  pretenders,  warlords,  and  rulers  of  North  India  was  enhanced  by 
the  close  association  of  Ujjainiya  brokerage,  first  with  the  pilgrimage  centre 
of  Baksar  near  Bhojpur  and,  secondly,  with  the  Sur  Afghans,  then  at  the 
start  of  their  comet-like  emergence  as  a  North  Indian  dynasty  in  the  1530s. 

A  bath  in  a  holy  tank  (the  term  here  is  used  in  the  Indian  sense  of  a 
water  reservoir)  of  Baksar,  known  as  Tiger  Tank,  ensured  a  young  peasant 
of  whatever  caste  both  consecration  as  a  fearless  warrior  -  for  that  is  what 
a  tiger  is  -  and,  importantly,  after  a  painless  deconsecration  during  which 
one  shed  one's  tiger  nature  after  long  years  of  service  (naukari),  a  chance  to 
return  to  one's  village  farm.  The  Afghan  Farid  Sur,  the  future  Delhi  sultan 
Sher  Shah,  depended  a  great  deal  on  the  Ujjainiya  Rajputs'  ability  to  muster 
men  by  the  thousands  -  by  no  means  all  from  their  own  clan,  but  from 
the  inexhaustible  manpower  of  Hindustan  -  and  on  his  personal  relation- 
ship with  their  leaders.  From  the  point  of  view  of  the  Hindustani  peasant 
fighter,  the  decision  to  serve  an  Ujjainiya  lord  could  turn  out  to  be  a  first 
step  towards  assuming  the  Ujjainiya  Rajput  identity  oneself  and  to  being 
adopted  as  a  member  of  the  clan.  Military  recruitment  often  was,  as  noted 
earlier,  a  great  engine  of  identity  change.  But  this  was  not  necessarily  always 
so.  In  the  military  labour  market  all  identities  remained  open,  multiple, 
flexible,  and  temporary  for  as  long  it  was  in  the  interest  of  the  functioning  of 
the  military  profession  as  an  aspect  of  the  agrarian  economy  of  Hindustan. 

At  the  battle  of  Surajgarh,  in  which  Sher  defeated  the  Bengal  army,  he 
put  3,000  hand-picked  Afghans  and  2,000  "Ujjainiyas"  under  their  leader 
Gajpat  Ujjainiya  in  his  first  line.  After  the  battle  was  won, 

all  the  spoils  of  war,  comprising  elephants,  horses,  and  other  equip- 
ments, which  had  fallen  into  the  hands  of  [Gajpat]  were  allowed  to  be 


258 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


retained  by  him.  At  the  time  of  departure  of  [Gajpat]  he  [Sher]  tied 
with  his  own  hand  the  bejewelled  sword  to  hang  round  [Gajpat's] 
waist,  bound  his  arm  with  a  jewelled  armlet,  gave  a  string  of  pearls 
round  his  neck,  fixed  a  bejewelled  ornament  in  his  headdress,  gave 
a  horse,  head-to-foot  dress  and  a  sword  for  prince  Bairishal  [Gajpat's 
brother],  and  gave  Baksar  as  a  fief  to  him.26 

I  have  quoted  this  passage  because  it  articulates  and  advertises  the  fame 
of  both  the  Sur  Afghans  and  the  Ujjainiya  leadership  as  agencies  of  great 
distributive  intensity:  naukari  under  a  military  agent  such  as  Gajpat  and, 
indirectly,  under  a  ruler  such  as  Sher  meant  a  share  in  spoils  that  might  be 
huge.  The  chronicles  telling  the  story  of  the  great  early  sixteenth-century 
Purbiya  warlords  of  Malwa  such  as  Silhadi  likewise  strongly  and  explicitly 
emphasize  their  wealth  and  largesse.27  The  organized  loot  of  large-scale  war 
was  far  more  profitable  than  the  haphazard  local  plundering  of  straggling 
travellers  and  small  groups  of  soldiers.  To  be  recruited  in  those  years  by  an 
Ujjainiya  broker  indeed  meant  profit  and  privilege. 

The  degree,  therefore,  to  which  one's  dream  as  a  naukar  would  come  true 
was  dependent  on  the  diplomatic  and  entrepreneurial  talent  of  the  dealer  in 
manpower  or  the  recruiting  warlord  one  joined  and  entrusted  one's  fate  to. 
In  addition,  however,  there  was  the  imponderable  factor  of  big  politics.  In  the 
case  of  Sher  Shah,  his  bitter  struggle  with  the  Mogul  Humayun  compelled 
the  Ujjainiya  agency  to  split  into  factions  in  order  to  keep  open  options  of 
naukari  in  several  directions,  a  strategy  that,  as  we  saw,  was  of  the  essence 
for  peasant  survival  in  North  India.  Sher  Shah  and  Humayun  cultivated 
the  Ujjainiya  clan  connection  as  desperately  as  the  local  Rajput  lineages 
needed  the  treasure  and  loot  of  major  campaigns. 

In  situations  like  this,  positions  easily  shifted.  For  groups  of  peasant 
soldiers,  there  was  a  constant  need  to  reconsider  one's  temporary  identity  as 
an  Ujjainiya  naukar,  and  to  re-evaluate  the  status  of  the  lord  or  ruler  whose 
salt  (namak)  one  ate.  Loyalty  to  a  throne  could  stand  in  the  way  of  survival. 
This  characteristic  of  contingent  or  ad  hoc  service  applied  much  more 
strongly  to  the  broker-state  relationship  (which  can  be  described  in  terms 
of  commodified  labour  and  aggregate  contracts)  than  to  the  relationship 
of  the  broker,  or  patron,  with  his  soldier  clients  (which  was  of  a  reciprocal 
nature).  This  broker-mediated,  two-level  model,  I  suggest,  is  valid  for  the 
entire  pre-British  period.  The  commodifying  agency  that  turned  village 

26  Ambashthya,  "The  Accounts  of  the  Ujjainiyas  in  Bihar",  p.  438. 

27  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  pp.  8sff. 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


259 


labour  into  state  labour  was  provided  by  brokers  with  local  roots,  who  were 
pivotal  in  ushering  the  peasant  to  a  niche  of  service  at  the  level  of  the  state 
in  a  way  that  preserved  his  autonomy  to  a  fair  degree. 

Not  all  options,  however,  would  be  open  at  all  times.  After  the  Moguls 
firmly  established  themselves  in  North  India  in  the  1570s,  the  patronage  of 
the  state  became  even  more  of  a  prize  than  earlier.  The  Ujjainiyas  retained 
a  hold  on  only  a  minor  share  of  it.  They  hung  on  as  managers  of  extensive 
agricultural  tracts  in  western  Bihar  and  continued  as  pugnacious  leaders  of 
undoubted  regional  notoriety;  yet,  by  the  time  of  Shahjahan's  reign  (1628- 
1658),  they  had  lost  their  role  as  the  principal  recruiters  and  middlemen 
of  the  great  reservoir  of  military  labour  of  central  Hindustan  to  others. 
At  least  partly,  Mogul  favour  by  then  had  shifted  first  to  the  clan  of  the 
Kachhwahas  of  Amber  in  Rajasthan,  and  then  to  the  Bundela  Rajputs  who 
were  zamindars  in  the  region  roughly  between  the  home  of  the  Gwaliyar 
Tomars  and  that  of  the  Ujjainiyas. 

No  Bundela  leader  was  ever  as  spectacularly  successful  as  the  Mogul 
emperor  Jahangir's  favourite  Raja  Bir  Singh  Deo  (d.  1627)  in  channelling  the 
resources,  financial  as  well  as  otherwise,  of  the  empire  towards  himself,  his 
clansmen,  and  the  soldiers  of  Hindustan.  A  hugely  talented  recruiting  agent 
and  military  manager,  he  succeeded  in  putting  numerous  units,  mainly 
infantry,  at  the  disposal  of  Jahangir  without  ever  having  to  relinquish  per- 
sonal command  over  them.  He  obtained  an  elevated  mansabdari  (service 
nobility)  rank:  in  1615,  it  was  4,700,  at  that  time  a  very  high  figure.  Only  very 
few  men  in  the  empire  ever  succeeded  to  the  same  extent  as  Bir  Singh  Deo 
in  monopolizing  control  of  the  military  labour  market  of  Hindustan  and 
combining  the  usually  distinct  functions  of  employer  (mansabdar)  and 
recruiter  of  peasant  infantry.  Jahangir  gave  Bir  Singh  Deo,  "than  whom 
in  the  rajput  caste  there  is  no  greater  nobleman",  as  he  wrote  of  him,  the 
title  of  maharaja.  Like  his  Tomar  and  Ujjainiya  predecessors,  the  financial 
means  Bir  Singh  Deo  was  able  to  invest  in  and  extract  from  the  Mogul  state 
were  impressive.  In  1624,  he  first  contributed  a  sum  of  between  200,000  and 
300,000  rupees  to  the  cost  of  the  imperial  campaign  in  eastern  Hindustan 
against  the  rebellious  prince  Khurram,  the  future  emperor  Shahjahan,  and 
in  the  end  plundered  his  camp  seizing  as  booty  many  gold  coins,  jewels, 
3,000  horses,  and  40  elephants.  Or  perhaps  it  is  better  to  say  that  he  pre- 
vented Khurram's  enemies  from  getting  hold  of  these  valuables,  because,  as 
a  Dutch  chronicler  remarked,  Bir  Singh  Deo  was  a  great  friend  of  the  prince. 
Naturally,  as  a  manpower  broker  he  had  to  have  friends  in  both  camps  in 
order  to  remain  in  place  as  a  partner  in  the  empire's  extortionate  enterprise. 


260 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


Bir  Singh  Deo's  spending  practices,  like  those  of  his  predecessors,  were 
impressive.  In  Agra  he  had  a  palace  on  the  river,  next  to  the  mansion  of  the 
famous  Man  Singh  Kachhwaha.  His  building  activities  in  Bundelkhand,  his 
home  region,  advertised  his  financial  might  and  his  standing  as  a  pious  and 
trustworthy  leader:  the  palace-fort  of  Datiya,  erected  at  a  cost  of  3.5  million 
rupees,  was  only  one  of  them;  the  famous  tanks  of  Bir  Sagar  and  Barwa 
Sagar  and  the  Chaturbhuj  Vishnu  temple  at  Orchha,  part  of  which  still 
stands,  were  others.  An  even  greater  achievement  of  his  was  the  Keshav  Dev 
temple,  devoted  to  Krishna,  at  Mathura,  which  according  to  Jean-Baptiste 
Tavernier,  the  French  traveller,  was  one  of  the  most  sumptuous  buildings  in 
all  India  and  was  visited  by  large  numbers  of  pilgrims.  Bir  Singh  Deo  himself 
went  to  Mathura  as  a  pilgrim  to  weigh  himself  against  an  amount  of  gold 
which,  together  with  an  additional  81  man  of  gold,  probably  representing 
the  eighty-one  districts  (parganas)  that  constituted  his  realm  (or  fief,  if  you 
like),  was  then  distributed  as  charity.  It  was  his  way  to  wash  off  the  physical 
and  political  impurities  of  his  career  -  he  was  the  murderer  of  Abu'l  Fazl, 
Akbar's  distinguished  minister  -  and  to  reconnect  with  the  principles  of 
dharmic  order,  as  well  as  to  advertise,  far  beyond  his  native  Bundelkhand, 
his  dominant  position  in  the  military  labour  market  of  Hindustan.28  But 
the  exercise  also  shows  the  enormous  distributive  energy  generated  by 
military  entrepreneurship.  Through  him  and  men  like  him,  large  sums  of 
money  found  their  way  back  into  the  village  economy,  though  probably 
not  always  into  the  hands  of  the  same  villagers  who  had  paid  these  sums 
as  taxes  in  the  first  place. 

In  this  manner,  Bir  Singh  Deo  set  in  motion  the  tradition  of  imperial 
naukari,  or  service,  of  Purbiya/Hindustani  peasant  soldiers  under  jobber- 
commanders  of  the  Bundela  clan.  Apart  from  its  economic  importance 
in  terms  of  the  flow  of  agrarian  revenue  back  to  the  countryside,  the  phe- 
nomenon of  massive  military  service,  or  naukari,  had  a  profound  cultural 
impact  on  peasant  society.  This  is  illustrated  by  the  veneration  in  which  the 
soldiers  -  again,  by  no  means  all  of  them  of  Bundela  lineages  themselves  - 
who  followed  Bir  Singh  Deo  and  his  successors,  came  to  hold  Hardaul,  one 
of  the  great  Bundela's  own  sons.  After  his  murder  by  one  of  his  brothers, 
Hardaul  became  the  object  of  devotion  in  a  soldiers'  cult  that  took  root  in 
the  core  region  of  Purbiya  recruitment,  i.e.,  in  all  the  districts  that  supplied 
young  men  (jawans)  to  the  jobber-commanders,  Bundela  and  otherwise, 
who  took  over  Bir  Singh  Deo's  business  after  his  death.  The  story  is  too  long 

28  Kolff  and  van  Santen,  De  Geschriften  van  Francisco  Pelsaert  over  Mughal  Indie,  pp.  187, 191-192, 
225,  249;  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  pp.  128-130. 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


261 


to  tell  here.  But  the  cult  was  yet  another  means  through  which  peasant 
boys  came  to  partake  of  a  specific  and  cherished  soldiers'  identity.29  The 
remoulding  of  old  social  and  ritual  distinctions,  the  adoption  of  second  or 
parallel  identities  of  a  sect  or  clan  nature,  whether  temporary  or  permanent, 
was  a  natural  corollary  of  what  I  termed  naukari  and  an  inextricable  part 
of  the  workings  of  the  military  labour  machine  of  North  India. 

After  the  decline  of  the  Ujjainiya  clan  and  Bir  Singh  Deo  Bundela's 
death,  minor  lineage  heads  of  both  clans  would  continue  to  be  active  in 
recruitment,  brokerage,  and  state  service.  During  the  heyday  of  the  empire, 
however,  the  Mogul  system  compelled  a  considerable  number  of  clans  and 
extended  families  of  zamindars  to  give  up  the  large-scale  employment  of 
war  bands  that  they  had  undertaken  on  their  own  account.  Though  some 
continued  to  seek  imperial  contracts  while  at  the  same  time  resisting  the 
empire's  interference  in  their  home  lands,  others  fell  back  on  the  manage- 
ment of  their  villages,  while  attempting  to  extricate  some  external  income 
from  police  duties  and  local  political  patronage. 

With  this,  the  military  labour  market  for  infantry  as  a  Longue  duree 
phenomenon  once  more  entered  a  new  phase,  this  time  partly  emancipated 
from  the  old  monopoly  of  localized  Rajput  clan  brokerage  and  assuming 
a  more  regional  identity.  It  came  of  age,  as  it  were,  in  the  jobbing  and 
ritual  practices  of  the  brahmanical  pilgrimage  centre  of  Baksar,  already 
mentioned,  right  at  the  centre  of  the  old  Purbiya  and  Ujjainiya  recruiting 
grounds  in  the  Bhojpur  district  of  West  Bihar.  As  early  as  1580  we  hear  of 
a  Brahman  Mogul  officer  who  attempted  to  draft  soldiers  at  that  place  or, 
rather,  at  the  holy  tank  of  that  name;  he  was  killed  on  the  bank  of  the  Ganga 
by  the  Ujjainiya  interest,  then  still  too  strong  to  brook  interference.  Half  a 
century  later,  however,  Mogul  intrusion  became  the  rule  rather  than  the 
exception.  Soon,  large  numbers  of  soldiers  derived  their  identity  from  a  real 
or  supposed  connection  with  Baksar  rather  than  from  a  Rajput  clan's  agency. 
Significantly,  they  became  known  as  Baksariyas,  a  name  that,  until  the  end 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  would  almost  be  synonymous  with  Hindustani 
musketeers  or  matchlockmen,  though  one  also  meets  some  Baksariya 
cavalry.  A  Mogul  source  of  1690  still  mentions  Baksariyas  and  Bundelas  as 
the  categories  that  sum  up  the  presence  of  regular  matchlockmen  in  the 
imperial  army.  But  soon  one  finds  only  the  first  identity.  By  the  second 
decade  of  the  eighteenth  century,  the  British  East  India  Company  had  some 
of  these  "sepoys"  in  its  pay.  In  1757,  "Baksariya"  musketeers  served  under 


29   Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  pp.  i45ff. 


262 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


Clive,  who,  in  the  next  year,  raised  the  third  Bengal  sepoy  battalion  in  the 
Bhojpur  area.30 

The  Baksariyas  served  under  jamadars,  officers  without  an  ethnically 
defined  identity,  to  whom  they  owed  their  recruitment.  In  the  eighteenth 
century,  these  officers,  increasingly  without  a  decisive  agrarian  base  them- 
selves, came  fully  into  their  own  as  a  category  of  recruiters-cum-officers. 
They  represented  the  crucial  manpower-nexus  of  the  military  labour 
market.  In  the  absence  of  the  old  clan  brokers  and  probably  connected 
with  the  adoption  of  sharpshooting  matchlocks  by  peasant  infantry  units, 
men  rose  from  the  ranks  and  set  themselves  up  as  autonomous  brokers. 
As  jamadars  they  performed  the  task  -  well-known  in  the  labour  history 
of  India  -  of  jobbers,  in  this  case  jobber-cum-commanders.  Without  their 
recruitment  expertise  and  negotiating  skills,  the  Purbiya  tradition  of 
soldiering  could  not  have  maintained  its  remarkable  near-monopoly  of 
the  market  for  infantrymen  in  North  India.  The  ordinary  sepoy  was  only 
"a  musket  in  a  mass  of  firepower",  dependent,  as  he  had  always  been,  on 
some  sort  of  labour  agency. 

On  the  jamadars'  loyalty  often  depended  the  political  fortunes  of  the 
Moguls,  the  Mogul  empire's  successor  states,  and  the  British  Company.  The 
fate  of  Siraj  ud-Daula,  the  ruler  of  Bengal  and  Clive's  adversary  at  Plassey 
in  1757,  hinged  crucially  on  his  principal  sepoy  jamadars.31  However,  far- 
reaching  as  the  revolutions  in  the  brokering  profession  were  for  some  of 
the  elite  groups  of  Hindustan,  in  the  experience  of  the  peasantries  service 
conditions  must  have  remained  largely  the  same.  Their  near-monopoly  of 
the  labour  market  never  depended  on  the  particular  brand  or  label  under 
which  their  clan  leaders  or  jamadars  negotiated  for  them  and  offered  their 
services  to  mansabdars,  provincial  rulers,  or  the  British.  The  Baksariyas, 
moreover,  just  as  the  Ujjainiya  and  Bundela  soldiers  before  them,  and  as 
their  successor  incarnation,  that  of  the  Company's  sepoys,  would  do,  always 
looked  forward  to  returning  to  the  family  farms  of  Hindustan  they  had  left 
as  boys  of  perhaps  only  seventeen  years  of  age.  They  served  as  jawans,  that 
is  young  men,  which  even  today  is  the  name  affectionately  given  in  India 
to  the  common  soldier.  At  the  age  of  forty,  when  according  to  tradition  one 
ceased  to  be  a  jawan,  it  was  high  time  to  return  home  to  one's  village.32  What 

30  Wickremesekera,  "Best  Black  Troops  in  the  World",  p.  100. 

31  Yang,  The  Limited  Raj,  pp.  191-194;  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  pp.  171, 174, 177, 179. 

32  The  dedication  on  war  monuments  in  modern  India  "Jay  kisdnjay jawan"  ("Hurrah  for  the 
peasant,  hurrah  for  the  soldier")  is  a  strong  reminder  of  the  continuing  association  in  public 
opinion  of  the  two  occupations. 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


263 


did  not  change  either,  at  least  for  a  while,  was  that,  though  restricted  in 
their  freedom  by  British  officers  and  new  rules  of  discipline  and  drill,  they 
endeavoured  where  possible  to  keep  their  options  open  and  renegotiate 
their  contracts,  especially  with  respect  to  pay  and,  as  we  shall  see,  caste 
status. 

Another  centuries-old  feature  of  the  Hindustani  labour  market  may, 
under  Company  rule,  even  have  become  more  prominent.  I  mean  the  self- 
recruiting  character  of  the  peasant  armies  discussed  earlier.  During  the 
eighteenth  century,  recruiting  parties  are  known  to  have  been  sent  to  vil- 
lages in  Company  territory.  Often,  however,  men  came  to  military  stations 
on  their  own  initiative.  The  regiments  actively  encouraged  their  sepoys  to 
bring  friends  and  relatives  as  potential  recruits.  In  1773  it  was  reported  that 
young  village  men  "presented  themselves  daily  on  the  parade  ground  for 
employment",  although,  when  an  urgent  need  arose,  trustworthy  Indian 
officersjamac/ars  and  havildars,  were  sent  out  on  behalf  of  the  Company 
regiment  to  bring  in  new  recruits.  Even  until  the  so-called  Mutiny  of  1857, 
methods  of  self-recruitment  like  these  remained  the  common  system.33 
From  within  the  regiments,  Indian  agency  and  patronage  monopolized  and 
fulfilled  the  military  employment  requirements  of  the  conquering  colonial 
state.  Rather  than  the  Company's  army  representing  a  world  separate  from 
village  society,  it  served,  in  a  way,  as  the  military  wing  of  the  agrarian 
economy  of  Hindustan,  a  guarantee  of  a  steady  flow  of  cash  to  numberless 
village  managers. 

Members  of  many  different  castes,  including  a  large  number  of  low  and 
"spurious"  castes,  had  traditionally  maintained  a  strong  foothold  on  military 
employment.34  As  the  Company  conquered  North  India  and  reduced  the 
number  of  territorial  chiefs  and  rulers,  however,  it  acquired  a  unique  posi- 
tion in  the  labour  market.  To  a  dramatic  degree,  the  employers'  demand  for 
military  labour  now  fell  far  short  of  the  available  supply.  Employment  op- 
portunities decreased  and  competition  for  fully  paid  military  jobs  became 
fierce.  Naturally,  the  landholding,  mainly  high-caste  elites  of  the  traditional 
recruiting  grounds  of  Hindustan,  who  were  allowed  to  recruit  whom  they 
pleased  by  the  army  authorities,  were  in  a  position  to  be  as  selective  when 
filling  vacancies  as  they  chose.  So,  they  turned  their  regiments  into  preserves 
of  their  own  castes.  Any  soldier  would  now  make  the  most  of  his  family  and 

33  Barat,  The  Bengal  Native  Infantry,  p.  49;  Alavi,  The  Sepoys  and  the  Company,  pp.  47-48. 
Wickremesekera  speaks  of  "the  jamadari  system  of  recruitment"  having  become  widespread 
by  the  early  eighteenth  century:  "Best Black  Troops  in  the  World",  p.  40. 

34  For  examples,  see  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  pp.  liyff. 


264 


DIRK  H.A.  KOLFF 


village  ties  and  present  his  younger  brothers,  nephews,  or  fellow  villagers 
to  his  commanding  officer  as  recruits.  The  process  was  already  underway 
in,  for  instance,  the  maharaja  of  Benares'  army  before  it  reached  that  of 
the  Company.  So  the  dominant  castes  of  Hindustan,  Bhumihar  brahmans 
and  several  clans  of  Rajputs,  made  themselves  into  the  dominant  castes  of 
the  Company's  sepoy  army,  not  only  culturally,  but  also  numerically.  As  a 
result,  the  Company's  regiments,  self-perpetuating  institutions  as  never 
before,  became  inward-looking  preserves  of  Hindustani  elite  power.  The 
Company  could  not  have  stopped  the  process.  In  fact,  as  it  strengthened  the 
social  cohesion  of  the  regiments,  officers  acquiesced  to  and  encouraged  it; 
colonial  blindness  even  made  them  suggest  it  was  their  own  predilection 
for  the  cleaner  castes  that  had  set  the  process  going.35 

So,  the  arrival  of  the  East  India  Company  on  North  India's  labour  market 
did  after  all  mean  a  break  with  tradition.  The  Company  was  in  a  position  to 
establish  a  monopoly  as  an  employer  of  soldiers,  at  least  at  the  state  level. 
This  largely  stopped  the  ongoing  hassle  and  fuss  of  the  soldiers'  brokers 
over  their  clients'  terms  of  service.  There  was  little  to  negotiate  now.  Village 
elites  may  have  held  on  to  their  monopoly  of  recruitment  in  large  parts 
of  Hindustan;  the  fact  of  the  exclusion  of  other  state  employers  by  the 
monopolist  Company  severely  reduced  the  sepoys'  power  of  negotiation 
when  it  came  to  formalizing  the  terms  of  service. 

Genealogically  speaking,  it  is  true  that  the  Company's  sepoy  army  was 
a  straight  descendant  and  a  reincarnation  of  the  Purbiya-Tomar-Ujjainiya- 
Bundela-Baksariya  tradition  of  Hindustani  peasant  soldiering.  It  is  also  true 
that  sepoys  continued  to  send  huge  amounts  of  pay  to  their  home  villages. 
By  its  grants  of  land  to  pensioned-off  soldiers  -  a  kind  of  latter-day  watan 
system  -  the  invalid  establishment  of  the  Company's  Bengal  Army  even 
strengthened  its  link  and  that  of  its  sepoys  with  the  traditional  recruiting 
grounds  of  Hindustan.  But  with  only  one  employer  left,  the  role  for  broker- 
age, for  labour  agents  and  jobber-commanders  (jamadars)  dwindled  to 
almost  nil.  Desertion  and  defection  to  another  warlord  or  state  were  no 
longer  options.  In  the  newly  juridified  atmosphere  of  the  colonial  state, 
aggressive  attempts  at  renegotiating  one's  terms  of  service  were  deemed 
to  be  mutinies. 

Inward-looking,  I  said.  Those  sepoys  who  were  lucky  enough  to  retain 
employment  with  the  monopolist  Company  compensated  their  loss  of 
negotiating  power  by  inventing  a  cult  of  themselves  as  pure  brahmans 

35  In  a  similar  process,  the  untouchables  were  gradually  excluded  from  the  ranks  of  the  Madras 
Army:  Wickremesekera,  "Best Black  Troops  in  the  World",  p.  103. 


PEASANTS  FIGHTING  FOR  A  LIVING  IN  EARLY  MODERN  NORTH  INDIA 


265 


and  respectable  Rajputs.  The  Company,  as  we  saw,  obliged.  Lower-caste 
sepoys,  such  as  the  Pasis,  who  had  contributed  much  to  the  centuries-old 
Purbiya  tradition  of  mobile  labour  and  had  helped  fight  Clive's  battles,  "were 
excluded  from  the  line,  in  order  to  more  fully  conciliate  the  higher  classes".36 

Even  then,  the  Bhumihars  -  a  new  identity  of  "military  brahmans"  -  and 
Rajputs  who  succeeded  in  holding  on  to  employment,  could  never  com- 
pletely reconcile  themselves  to  a  contract  that  deprived  them  of  all  options 
of  service  other  than  those  that  suited  the  British.  Their  last  bid  to  regain 
their  old  freedom  of  negotiation  according  to  the  ancient  code  of  honourable 
free  agency  or  naukari  would  come  to  naught  in  the  rising  of  1857. 

After  that,  the  options  on  the  market  for  mobile  labour  in  Hindustan 
would  be  even  more  meagre  than  before.  In  a  radical  shift  of  policy,  the 
British  turned  westwards,  especially  to  the  Punjab,  for  its  recruits.  The  old 
system  -  which  I  characterized  as  a  two-tiered  one,  composed,  at  the  level  of 
the  village  economy,  of  a  relatively  free  and  reciprocal  relationship  between 
surplus  agrarian  labour  and  locally  rooted  brokers  and,  at  the  level  of  the 
broker-state  relationship,  of  freely  contracted  service  deals  of  aggregated, 
commodified  labour  -  collapsed  for  good.  For  most  men  in  the  old  recruiting 
villages  of  Hindustan,  there  was  no  alternative,  then,  but  to  stick  to  their 
share  of  the  family  fields  and,  if  it  seemed  advantageous,  force  out  of  the 
agrarian  labour  market  the  lower-status  men  they  had  deprived  of  profitable 
army  service  two  or  three  generations  earlier.  No  compensation  in  the  form 
of  new  employment  opportunities  was  offered  except  in  the  tea  gardens  of 
Assam,  as  a  strongman  in  one  of  the  armed  gangs  of  the  odd  big  landholder 
in  Bengal,  or  as  an  indentured  labourer  in  one  of  the  overseas  parts  of  the 
empire.  For  these  jobs,  brokerage  was  in  the  hands  of  men  appointed  by  the 
colonial  authorities  in  Calcutta,  men  with  no  roots  or  interest  in  agrarian 
Hindustan,  which  now  entered  a  long  phase  of  often  abject  poverty. 


36  Chattopadhyaya,  The  Sepoy  Mutiny,  7857,  p.  72;  Singh,  Indian  Army  under  the  East  India 
Company,  p.  157;  Kolff,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy,  pp.  28,  ii7ff.  The  quote  -  taken  from  the  remi- 
niscences of  a  British  officer  published  in  1830  -  is  found  in  Peers,  '"The  Habitual  Nobility  of 
Being'",  550.  See  also  Gordon,  "Symbolic  and  Structural  Constraints",  p.  173. 


"True  to  their  salt" 


Mechanisms  for  recruiting  and  managing  military  labour 
in  the  army  of  the  East  India  Company  during  the  Carnatic 
Wars  in  India 

Robert Johnson 

South  Asian  personnel  were  critically  important  to  the  British  military 
effort  in  the  Carnatic  Wars  (1746-1748, 1749-1754, 1757-1763).  Since  European 
personnel  were  relatively  few  in  number,  they  were  compelled  to  augment 
their  strength  with  a  trained  cadre  of  indigenous  men.1  As  in  other  theatres 
of  war  in  the  period  1746-1763,  the  recruitment  of  military  labour  into  armies 
from  beyond  the  parent  state  was  common.  In  North  America,  Europe,  and 
South  Asia,  native  or  mercenary  forces  were  employed  with  an  emphasis  on 
the  steady  improvement  of  their  efficiency  and  cost-effectiveness  although 
quality  was  linked  to  the  tasks  they  were  to  perform. 

Drawing  on  the  background  to  the  Carnatic  Wars,  this  chapter  analyses 
the  types,  recruitment  patterns,  and  uses  of  military  labour,  offering  a 
comparison  between  those  drawn  from  Europe  and  the  subcontinent, 
including  the  assessments  made  by  contemporaries.  In  contrast  to  recent 
historiographical  trends  that  seek  to  emphasize  ideological  judgements 
about  the  use  of  South  Asian  labour,  archival  records  suggest  the  Brit- 
ish were  eminently  pragmatic  in  their  decisions  about  manpower.  They 
interpreted  conditions  in  India  through  their  own  experiences,  looking  for 
particular  "types",  but  they  also  borrowed  from  local  practices,  particularly 
when  the  sheer  demand  for  trained  manpower  in  the  1750s  outweighed 
any  ideological  considerations.  Nevertheless,  the  British  were  aware  of  the 
need  to  acknowledge  cultural  sensitivities,  and  the  Company  army  was  not 
entirely  converted  to  a  "European"  model. 

In  order  to  assist  in  making  wider  comparative  judgements  about  military 
labour  in  this  period,  it  is  possible  to  identify  here  certain  taxonomies  and 
evolutionary  trends  in  common  with  other  areas  of  global  labour  history 
research.  The  army  of  the  East  India  Company  in  the  period  1746-1763, 
regardless  of  its  quality,  represents  a  shift  from  a  force  consisting  of  Euro- 

1  South  Asian  labour  was  not  confined  to  filling  the  ranks  of  the  Europeans'  armies,  as  a 
great  number  of  local  civilians  and  camp  followers  were  vital  to  the  functioning  of  the  logistical 
chain.  However,  this  aspect  of  employment  remains  outside  the  scope  of  this  chapter. 


268 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


pean  "conscript  professionals"  with  a  handful  of  "ethnic  conscripts"  and 
"ethnic  mercenaries",  led  by  an  officer  corps  that  was  in  part  "mercenary 
professional".  By  the  end  of  the  Third  Carnatic  War,  the  troops  of  the  East 
India  Company  resembled  "ethnic  professionals",  augmented  by  auxiliaries 
who  might  still  be  categorized  as  "ethnic  mercenaries",  thus  constitut- 
ing a  "mixed  force"  of  labour  types.  The  European  contingent,  raised  by 
a  combination  of  voluntarism  and  "crimping"  (impressment),  remained 
either  "professional  mercenaries"  or  "professional  conscripts".  This  chapter 
examines  these  changes  and  continuities,  illustrating  an  army  on  the  cusp 
of  a  significant  transformation  in  its  imperial  labour  systems. 

Staying  true  to  their  salt:  The  historiographical  context 

Over  the  past  thirty  years,  a  great  deal  of  attention  has  been  paid  to  inter- 
pretations of  the  British  colonial  encounter  in  South  Asia  in  the  light  of 
post-colonial  studies. z  There  has  been  a  comprehensive  search  for  the  ideo- 
logical assumptions  and  constructions  of  the  colonizers  and  the  subsequent 
reactions  of  the  colonized.  The  approach  itself  has  been  scrutinized  and 
critiqued,  with  detractors  arguing  that  the  colonized  were  not  simply  pas- 
sive victims  of  colonizing  "discourses"  and  power  relationships,  but  active 
agents  in  the  dynamic  processes  at  work.  Subsequently  some  scholars  have 
tried  to  show  that  the  British  Empire  and  its  colonial  subjects  were  engaged 
in  "dialogues"  of  power,  that  the  British  system  was  flexible  and  porous,  and 
that  the  debate  had  not  taken  sufficient  notice  of  gender  in  its  analysis  of 
class  and  race.3  However,  there  seemed  to  be  a  universal  acceptance  of  the 
idea  that  "empire"  was  inherently  violent,  stripping  peoples  of  power  and 
dignity,  and  at  times  altering  their  behaviour  so  profoundly  that,  even  after 
independence,  colonial  taxonomies  persisted.  With  a  deeply  moralizing 
agenda  in  keeping  with  late  twentieth-century  ideas  of  social  justice  and 
equality,  the  British  period  in  India  was  condemned  as  fundamentally 
unjust,  often  cruel,  and  irredeemably  corrupt.  These  debates  are  particularly 
important  in  any  consideration  of  military  labour  in  South  Asia  in  the 
eighteenth  century. 

However,  far  from  simply  being  a  system  of  violence,  the  East  India  Com- 
pany used  its  army,  in  keeping  with  mid-eighteenth-century  ideas  about 

2  Said,  Orientalism;  Guha  and  Spivak,  Selected  Subaltern  Studies;  Spivak,  "Can  the  Subaltern 
Speak?" 

3  Washbrook,  'Orients  and  Occidents'. 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


269 


the  state  and  public  order,  to  establish  pacified  regions  more  conducive  to 
commerce.  They  were  engaged  in  partnerships  and  alliances.  The  recruit- 
ment of  an  effective,  trained,  and  disciplined  army  was  a  crucial  element 
of  this  process,  and  was  seen  as  fundamental  to  the  exploitation  of  the 
military  labour  market. 

It  is  important  to  emphasize,  from  the  outset,  this  pragmatic  character  of 
governance,  recruitment,  military  organization,  and  pacification.  Despite 
numerous  attempts  to  identify  ideological  reasons  for  the  expansion  of 
Company  rule  in  India,  the  conduct  of  its  officers  and  the  raising  or  use 
of  armies,  the  British  displayed  a  practical  approach  to  the  problems  they 
confronted.  Their  points  of  reference  were,  unsurprisingly,  entirely  Euro- 
pean, but  they  applied  no  rigid  systems  and  responded  in  a  way  that  took 
account  of  local  conditions  to  establish  their  own  local  supremacy,  the  free 
flow  of  trade,  minimal  costs,  and  maximum  profit.  Moreover,  the  army  was 
crucial  to  the  way  that  the  East  India  Company  developed:  faced  with  a 
great  threat  from  French  forces  and  local  instability,  the  Company  employed 
a  greater  proportion  of  trained  Indian  personnel  and  engaged  in  a  series 
of  significant  military  operations.  While  the  British  adopted  European 
standards  in  selection,  training,  and  tactics,  they  were  also  conscious  of  the 
limitations  of  British  personnel  in  terms  of  health,  quality,  and  availability. 

It  is  generally  accepted  that  the  British  learned  from  the  French  model  in 
the  Carnatic  Wars  of  the  1740s,  namely,  that  Indian  manpower,  trained  in 
European  modes  of  warfare,  was  crucial  to  winning  campaigns  in  the  sub- 
continent. Philip  Mason  suggested  that,  once  the  British  learned  the  value 
of  the  Indian  sepoy,  they  possessed  the  means  to  conquer  the  subcontinent.4 
However,  Channa  Wickremesekera  disagreed,  pointing  to  the  widespread 
contempt  for  Indian  soldiers  and  their  secondary  roles  in  the  campaigns.5 
He  argued  that  the  Europeans  felt  the  Indians  were  incapable  of  effective 
leadership  or  initiative.  Indians  were  used  primarily  as  factory  guards  or 
garrison  troops.  Where  units  were  raised,  they  were  Europeanized,  that  is 
trained,  drilled,  and  even  clothed  on  European  lines,  under  British  officers. 
He  argued  that  Indian  troops  were  rarely  used  against  French  troops,  and 
tended  to  be  deployed  only  to  guard  the  baggage  and  lines  of  communica- 
tion. If  they  performed  well,  the  British  attributed  this  to  their  own  officers 
or  the  inspiration  of  the  British  troops  who  accompanied  them.  In  the  key 
engagements  of  the  Seven  Years  War  (1756-1763,  contemporaneous  with 

4  Mason,  A  Matter  of  Honour,  pp.  29-38. 

5  Wickremesekera,  European  Success  and  Indian  Failure  in  the  SEC.  See  also  Wickremesekera, 
"Best Black  Troops  in  the  World". 


270 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


the  Third  Carnatic  War),  European  troops  invariably  led  in  the  assault.  The 
only  significant  changes,  he  argued,  were  in  the  numbers  actually  employed 
(which  was  a  consequence  of  extended  commitments)  and  an  equalization 
in  weaponry  between  British  and  Indian  troops  (since,  after  1760,  both  were 
armed  with  flintlocks). 

It  is  easy  to  assume  that  racial  stereotypes,  which  were  to  become  so 
prominent  in  the  nineteenth  century,  determined  ideas  in  this  period.  In 
fact,  calculations  about  the  need  for,  and  costs  of,  military  labour  were  more 
important.  The  East  India  Company  was  eager  to  find  those  who  would  work 
with  it  and  sought,  in  peacetime,  simply  to  keep  labour  costs  to  a  minimum. 
Moreover,  manpower  demands  in  wartime  could  overcome  peacetime 
prejudices  very  rapidly.  Furthermore,  while  it  is  easy  to  find  episodes  in 
which  Indians  were  not  trusted  to  make  independent  judgements  without 
the  direction  of  European  officers,  this  would  also  apply  in  exactly  the  same 
way  to  European  infantrymen.  Men  with  rural  backgrounds,  lacking  educa- 
tion, characterized  both  European  and  Indian  foot  soldiers.  Discipline  was 
harsh  for  both,  but  was  proven,  time  after  time,  to  be  necessary  to  drill  men 
to  overcome  their  instinctive  desire  to  save  themselves  in  close-quarters 
battle.  The  forging  of  a  collective  solidarity  and  sense  of  purpose,  often 
through  the  moniker  of  the  regiment  or  the  willingness  to  follow  a  particular 
leader,  applied  equally  to  British  and  Indian  troops.  The  environment  and 
human  health  also  had  a  part  to  play.  Gerald  Bryant  argued  that  the  need 
to  garrison  India  and  to  provide  internal  security,  in  an  environment  that 
Europeans  found  debilitating  and  even  lethal,  one  for  which  Indian  troops 
were  better  suited,  meant  that  Indians  were  preferred. 6  Moreover,  some 
European  officers  were  critical  of  the  poor  performance  of  low-quality 
European  soldiers  compared  with  the  sepoys. 

In  the  1740s,  the  British  had  been  content  to  use  casually  employed  local 
armed  men  for  the  protection  of  their  caravans,  goods,  and  quarters.7  From 
the  outset,  control  of  territory  brought  with  it  the  obligation  of  maintaining 
the  security  of  the  population,  although  the  Company's  priority  was  to  avoid 
this  sort  of  commitment  in  favour  of  commercial  activity.  Initially,  the  only 
reliable  military  forces  were  European  troops  shipped  from  the  British  Isles. 
The  first  were  the  King's  troops,  four  companies  of  which  landed  in  Bombay 
in  1662  and  who  were  invited  to  take  up  their  arms  in  1668  as  "mercenary- 
professionals"  of  the  East  India  Company.  In  1664,  two  companies  of  "Ra- 
jputs" had  been  enlisted,  but  they  got  neither  British  officers  nor  training. 

6  Bryant,  The  East  India  Company  and  Its  Army. 

7  Mason,  A  Matter  of  Honour,  p.  30. 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


271 


They  used  their  own  weapons  and  possessed  no  uniforms,  and  their  pay 
was  often  in  arrears.  They  were  accordingly  described  by  the  governor  of 
Bombay  as  "more  like  bandits  in  the  woods  than  military  men".  In  response, 
he  organized  a  militia  of  all  freemen  and  landholders.  The  officers  were 
British  but  the  ranks  were  filled  with  Indians,  most  of  whom  had  converted 
to  Christianity.  Nevertheless,  in  1706,  six  companies  of  "Gentoos"  (Hindus) 
were  disbanded  because  they  were  so  unreliable.  By  the  1740s,  garrisons 
were  held  by  Europeans  and  elderly  or  infirm  "mestees"  (men  of  mixed 
Portuguese  and  Indian  descent,  sometimes  described  as  "Portuguese"), 
"Topasses"  and  "Peons"  (Christian  Indians,  the  latter  being  the  term  used 
in  Madras),  and  "seapoys"  (men  armed  with  their  own  weapons,  fit  only  for 
guard  duty).8  In  February  1747,  Madras  was  protected  by  3,000  peons  but 
only  900  had  muskets  and  these  were  all  matchlocks.  The  verdict  that  one 
must  draw  is  that  the  Indian  troops  in  the  Company's  employment  before 
1750  were  cheap  and  were  attracted  by  financial  reward  but  were  of  a  very 
low  quality  indeed  -  all  of  which  was  the  result  of  peacetime  parsimony. 

The  British  Indian  forces  serving  the  Company  were  transformed  by 
encounters  with  the  French.  The  nawab  of  the  Carnatic  had  been  defeated 
by  a  French  force  made  up  of  Europeans  and  sepoys  under  Captain  Paradis, 
while  the  fleet  under  Bertrand  de  la  Bourdonnais  had  taken  Madras  in 
1746.  By  contrast,  the  British,  despite  having  a  strong  fleet,  failed  to  capture 
Pondicherry  simply  because  they  lacked  the  resources  and  manpower  for 
a  land  campaign.  Although  Madras  was  returned  on  the  conclusion  of 
peace  two  years  later,  the  seriousness  of  the  threat  and  the  French  alliances 
with  local  rulers  had  revealed  the  precarious  position  of  the  East  India 
Company  in  the  subcontinent.  The  "unofficial  war"  between  British  and 
French  forces  in  India  in  fact  continued,  with  each  unable  to  maintain  a 
fleet  off  the  east  coast  of  India  for  long,  and  with  both  sides  plagued  by 
the  steady  loss  of  European  troops,  who  died  of  disease.  The  French  and 
particularly  the  British  had  too  few  European  troops  to  take  and  hold  all 
the  hill  fortifications  that  lay  between  their  territories  or  those  of  their 
allies.  Garrisoning  the  settlements  that  were  captured  used  up  precious 
manpower.  The  solution  was  therefore  entirely  pragmatic:  recruit  more 
Indian  personnel  who  could  cope  better  with  the  climate,  survive  local 
diseases,  and  augment  the  dwindling  numbers  of  trained  Europeans. 

The  British  position  was  weakened  further  when  Marquis  Joseph  Francois 
Dupleix,  the  governor-general  of  the  French  possessions  in  India,  allied 
himself  with  the  new  nizam  of  the  Deccan,  and  earned  the  Mogul  title 


8     Lenman,  Britain's  Colonial  Wars,  p.  88. 


272 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


of  "Commander  of  the  Seven  Thousand"  from  the  Emperor.  At  Arcot,  the 
French  had  gained  another  ally,  Chanda  Sahib,  the  new  nawab  of  the  Car- 
natic.  This  put  several  thousand  Indian  troops  at  the  disposal  of  France.  The 
British  had  backed  Chanda  Sahib's  rival,  Mohammed  Ali,  at  Trichinopoly 
and  provided  a  garrison  of  600  men,  but  the  city  was  besieged  in  1751.  At 
Fort  St  George  in  Madras  and  Fort  St  David,  there  were  barely  350  British 
personnel  available  -  too  few  for  a  relief  force.  Nevertheless,  Robert  Clive, 
who  had  been  appointed  originally  as  commissary  of  supply,  was  permitted 
to  march  out  with  200  European  and  300  Indian  troops,  and  three  small 
field  guns,  to  make  an  audacious  attack  on  Chanda  Sahib's  capital  at  Arcot. 
After  the  surprise  capture  of  the  town,  Clive  put  the  settlement,  with  its 
mile-long  perimeter,  into  a  state  of  defence.  Clive  possessed  only  120  British 
and  200  Indians  fit  for  duty  at  the  commencement  of  the  siege.  After  a 
bombardment,  a  series  of  sorties,  and  a  major  attack  on  a  breach  in  the 
walls,  this  garrison  had  been  reduced  to  80  British  soldiers  and  120  sepoys. 
Nevertheless,  reinforced,  and  then  relieved  at  Arcot,  by  additional  indig- 
enous troops,  Clive  pursued  the  French  and  Indian  armies  and  inflicted  a 
major  defeat  on  them  at  Ami. 

Clive's  successes  helped  turn  the  tide  of  the  war:  Chanda  Sahib's  forces 
were  drawn  off  from  Trichinopoly;  Mysore  and  a  portion  of  Marathas  joined 
Mohammed  Ali.  Dupleix  tried  to  restore  the  situation  by  advancing  towards 
Madras  with  400  Frenchmen  and  2,000  sepoys.  This  force  ambushed  Clive 
at  Kaveripak  (1752),  when  the  British  had  force-marched  to  intercept  him. 
Clive  defeated  the  ambush  with  his  own  outnumbered  brigade.  Indian  men 
employed  by  the  Company  went  on  to  fight  against  the  French  and  their 
allies,  describing  themselves  as  the  "veterans  of  Arcot"  which,  given  there 
had  only  been  120  survivors  and  the  new  force  numbered  600,  might  refer 
to  French-trained  sepoys  who  had  changed  sides.9  There  are  other  possible 
explanations.  They  may  have  been  sick  soldiers  who  had  recovered,  or  new 
recruits  who  had  joined  the  core  of  the  old  formation,  although  changing 
sides  was  not  so  unusual  in  the  fluid  arrangements  of  the  labour  market 
of  southern  India. 

What  was  clear,  from  the  emergence  of  the  French  as  a  more  significant 
rival  to  the  East  India  Company  in  the  subcontinent  after  1750,  was  that 
the  British  were  deficient  in  trained  manpower.  Indian  personnel  were 
therefore  trained  by  Clive  and  others  on  the  French  model  and,  by  the  end 
of  the  fighting  in  1753,  it  was  clear  that  organization,  improved  discipline, 
and  the  toughening  experience  of  campaigning  had  improved  the  quality 


9     Mason,  A  Matter  of  Honour,  p.  30. 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


273 


of  the  British  Indian  forces.  The  fact  was  that  European  personnel  in  India 
were  not  available  in  sufficient  numbers.  Part  of  the  problem  was  the  supply: 
there  was  considerable  competition  for  recruits  with  the  regular  army 
back  in  Britain.  The  outbreak  of  the  Seven  Years  War  in  Europe  therefore 
necessitated  that  regular  regiments  were  sent  out  to  India.  This  immediately 
raised  questions  about  whether  the  Company  or  the  Army  should  exercise 
command  and  jurisdiction,  but  with  63  per  cent  of  the  Company's  forces 
being  made  up  of  regular  units,  the  issue  of  manpower  and  who  was  to 
provide  it  became  a  critical  and  much  debated  issue.10  In  Britain,  potential 
recruits  sought  to  avoid  all  of  the  tropical  destinations  as  death  traps,  and 
that  included  India.11  The  regular  army,  which  needed  to  fill  its  own  ranks, 
pressured  its  parliamentary  allies  to  limit  Company  recruitment  quotas. 
These  pressures  meant  that  the  Company  was  compelled  to  release  more 
funds  to  raise  local  personnel. 

The  recruitment  of  the  Company  Army 

In  1757,  Robert  Clive  had  recruited  the  first  Bengal  native  regiment,  the  Lai 
Paltan,  as  a  selected  515  men  serving  under  British  officers,  thus  expand- 
ing the  Company  Army  from  its  companies  in  Madras  and  its  garrison  at 
Bombay.  According  to  a  return  of  the  Bengal  troops  dated  10  April  1757, 
Clive  commanded  some  1,914  "Seapoys",  of  which  1,400  were,  in  fact,  from 
Madras.  In  addition,  the  return  listed  257  topasses,  157  of  whom  were  drawn 
from  Bombay  and  the  rest  from  Madras,  but  all  of  these  were  confined  to 
garrison  and  guard  duty. 

The  new  Bengal  sepoys  were  picked  using  the  standard  British  criteria 
of  the  day.  Many  British  soldiers  were  enlisted  in  rural  Scotland  as  well  as 
the  English  countryside  because  of  a  preference  for  rural  workers.  Tall  and 
physically  robust  men  were  selected  because  of  the  endurance  required 
in  military  service.  Agricultural  labourers  were  considered  tougher,  more 
used  to  the  outdoors,  able  to  move  longer  distances,  and  more  biddable  than 
urban  folk.  The  Indian  recruits  had  to  stand  5*7"  tall  and  meet  the  same 

10  Gilbert,  "Recruitment  and  Reform  in  the  East  India  Company  Army",  p.  91. 

11  In  analysing  the  numbers  sick  in  Clive 's  return  of  1757,  we  find  that,  for  the  British,  16  officers 
of  70  were  sick,  representing  23  per  cent  of  their  strength.  There  were  176  Other  Ranks  (ORs) 
of  1,219  (including  25  of  257  Topasses),  representing  14  per  cent.  For  the  sepoys,  53  of  1,914  were 
sick,  representing  just  3  per  cent  of  their  strength.  Average  sick  rates  in  1790s  for  the  Company 
Army  as  a  whole  were  17  per  cent  and  the  death  rate  was  5  per  cent:  WO  17 1742  and  1743.  National 
Archives,  Kew. 


274 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


physical  standards  as  would  any  British  enlisted  man.  There  was  little  that 
was  ideological  about  this,  and  the  approach  was  universal. 

There  were,  however,  some  other  considerations.  In  1750,  Robert  Orme 
drew  up  a  categorization  of  "martial  races"  based  on  the  dietary  habits  and 
climatic  zones  of  the  subcontinent.12  While  the  issue  of  "martial  races"  has 
become  mired  in  ideological  debates  on  race  that  belong  to  the  nineteenth 
century,  in  this  period  the  criteria  and  associations  were  far  more  pragmat- 
ic.13 In  general  terms,  Orme  believed  that  wheat-growing  areas  produced 
physically  better  and  therefore  more  "martial"  types  than  the  areas  where 
rice  was  grown  and  where  people  were  shorter.  Accordingly,  the  Company 
confined  its  recruitment  to  villages  in  wheat  zones  and  therefore  largely 
within  its  own  territories.14  In  1757,  immediately  after  Plassey,  the  Company 
recruited  in  the  Bengal  Presidency  because  it  was  dissatisfied  with  the 
standards  of  recruits  in  the  nawab  of  Bengal's  forces,  but  it  found  that  few 
men  met  the  required  height  standard.15  The  rural  men  were  thought  to 
be  "undersized".  As  a  result,  by  the  1770s,  recruitment  had  been  extended 
into  northern  India,  where,  again,  wheat-growing  predominated.  There,  the 
British  most  often  selected  what  they  considered  "higher-caste  Brahmans". 
This  was  not  just  because  of  their  physique  however,  but  of  self-perceptions 
of  "warrior  traditions"  and  their  ability  to  influence  the  recruitment  of  other 
"sturdy"  peasants.  This  self-perception  as  an  ethnic  professional  social  group 
is  evident  in  other  locations  outside  South  Asia  in  this  period. 

Another  criterion  for  the  recruitment  of  British  troops  in  Scotland,  ac- 
cording to  John  Prebble,  had  been  the  need  to  find  employment  for  unskilled 
men  who  might  otherwise  foment  disorder.16  The  significant  demographic 
shift  in  Britain  in  the  mid  to  late  eighteenth  century  meant  rural  over- 
population could  be  managed  in  part  by  a  natural  flow  to  urban  areas 
and  in  part  by  employment  in  the  armed  forces.  Having  just  confronted 
the  serious  rebellion  of  the  '45,  it  was  understandable  that  British  authori- 
ties should  be  focused  on  questions  of  civil  order  and  the  management  of 
populations.  In  the  Terai  areas  of  Bengal,  Robert  Brooke  was  charged  with 
establishing  a  regiment  to  absorb  selected  hill-raiders  and  to  employ  them 
in  the  pacification  of  their  own  homelands.  Warren  Hastings  expressed  the 
view  that  preserving  the  caste  system  in  India  would  prevent  the  "danger 

12  Orme,  Historical  Fragments  of  the  Mughal  Empire. 

13  The  debate  and  its  origins  are  fully  unravelled  in  Roy,  Brown  Warriors  of  the  Raj. 

14  See,  for  example,  Maj.  Stainford  to  K.  Kyd,  9  March  and  17  March  1779,  P/18/47,  India  Office 
Records  [henceforth,  IOR]. 

15  Khan,  SeirMutaquerin. 

16  Prebble,  Mutiny;  Galloway,  White  People,  Indians  and  Highlanders. 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


275 


that  they  will  soon  be  united  and  embodied  as  an  armed  nation  after  the 
example  of  the  Sikhs".17  He  was  concerned  that  they  might  "become  too 
formidable  for  their  rulers".  The  Company  therefore  continued  to  co-opt 
potential  and  even  actual  enemies  throughout  the  next  seventy  years  and, 
with  the  exception  of  the  Bengal  regiments,  looked  particularly  for  men 
from  marginalized  or  peripheral  rural  communities  who  would  have  little 
sympathy  for  the  majority  of  the  population. 

The  effect  of  British  concerns  about  rebellion  and  the  raising  of  Indian 
regiments  was  to  exaggerate  the  special  status  of  caste  privileges  in  Indian 
units,  preserving  their  preference  not  to  travel  across  the  Kala  Pani  (the 
black  sea),  to  eat  only  certain  foods,  and  to  respect  religious  rituals.  These 
enhanced  the  self-esteem  of  the  troops,  but  caused  resentment  among 
civilians  of  similar  caste.  These  moves  were  designed  to  enhance  recruit- 
ment, separate  the  sepoy  from  any  attachment  to  the  people,  and  ensure 
continued  loyalty  to  the  Company  above  the  local  population.  It  was  for 
these  reasons  also  that  the  Company's  military  men  opposed  the  ingress  of 
Christian  missionaries  who  might,  reflected  the  subsequent  commander-in- 
chief,  Charles  Cornwallis,  "endanger  a  government  which  owes  its  principal 
support  to  a  native  army  composed  of  men  of  high  caste  whose  fidelity 
and  affections  we  have  hitherto  secured  by  an  unremitted  attention  not 
to  offend  their  religious  scruples  and  superstitions".18 

However,  the  practice  of  recruitment,  following  British  methods,  was 
not  entirely  uniform.  In  Britain,  recruiting  sergeants  would  seek  disaf- 
fected workers,  enquiring  as  to  those  who  felt  their  masters  were  unjust, 
their  wages  too  low,  or  their  lives  too  limited  by  their  womenfolk.  Pay  and 
employment,  especially  when  other  options  were  limited,  were  a  strong 
incentive  to  enlist.  Family  size  seems  to  have  made  a  difference  for  some, 
as  opportunities  to  inherit  land  or  business  were  curtailed.  A  tradition  of 
some  sort  of  public  service  within  the  family,  often  military,  could  make  the 
appeal  stronger.  Young  men,  regardless  of  their  nationality,  often  express  a 
desire  to  be  tested  as  a  rite  of  manhood,  or  to  experience  adventure  in  such 
a  way  as  to  elevate  their  esteem  with  peers,  family,  or  clan.  Some  men  were 
trying  to  escape  issues  at  home  (the  "push"  factors)  including  getting  women 
pregnant,  drudgery,  and  petty  crimes,  but  others  felt  the  army  had  its  own 
attractions  (the  "pull"  factors),  including  the  ostentation  of  uniform,  or  the 


17  Warren  Hastings,  Collections  of  Essays,  Add.  29234,  Hastings  Papers. 

18  Cornwallis  to  the  Bishop  of  Salisbury,  1788,  Cornwallis  Papers,  PRO  30/11/187,  National 
Archives,  Kew. 


276 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


appearance  of  young  men  returning  on  furlough  who  were  better  fed,  taller, 
and  fitter  and  who  often  encouraged  others  to  enlist.19 

In  Britain,  there  were  also  some  sharp  practices.  Wealthy  men  hoping  to 
advance  themselves  by  the  raising  of  a  regiment  for  the  government,  such 
as  the  Duke  of  Athole  in  1778,  were  not  above  using  the  middlemen  of  local 
businesses  and  hired  agents  as  "human  blood  hounds"  to  pursue  men  and 
conscript  them.20  Officially,  recruiting  sergeants  were  permitted  to  raise 
groups  of  men  "by  beat  of  drum",  literally  beating  a  tattoo  to  get  the  atten- 
tion of  young  men  and  then  regaling  them  with  stories  of  immediate  cash, 
generous  wages,  adventure,  and  personal  glory.  At  country  fairs  and  taverns 
alcohol  and  stirring  military  music  sometimes  encouraged  men  further. 
These  tricks  tended  to  attract  a  low  quality  of  recruit,  as  recruiting  sergeants 
themselves  recognized.  Many  people  had  a  low  regard  for  the  army,  and 
artisan  families  felt  that  enlistment  was  the  act  of  the  desperate.  However, 
countless  young  men  still  regarded  the  army  as  a  manly  profession,  with 
glamorous  uniforms  likely  to  seduce  women. 

In  its  search  for  European  personnel,  the  Company  was  forced  to  hire 
"crimps",  agents  who  were  paid  on  the  basis  of  the  number  of  recruits  they 
ensnared.*1  Kidnapping  was  common,  the  victims  being  locked  up  until  they 
could  be  placed  on  board  a  ship  and  sent  out  to  India.  The  only  volunteers 
coming  forward  were  those  attempting  to  escape  imprisonment  or  the 
gallows.  There  were  no  officers  to  escort  them  or  depots  in  Britain  and 
consequently  there  was  no  attempt  to  instil  any  discipline  or  training. 
They  were  largely  debtors,  drunks,  and  criminals,  and  they  were  accused  of 
carrying  "insolence,  mutiny,  profligacy,  debauchery  and  disease  into  their 
Armies  in  India".22  To  make  matters  worse,  the  Company  did  not  have  the 
powers  of  martial  law  over  their  recruits  while  they  were  still  in  Britain. 
Part  of  the  reason  for  the  draconian  recruitment  process  was  to  prevent 
men  simply  escaping  back  to  civilian  life. 

When  the  Seven  Years  War  began,  the  numbers  of  men  recruited  for  the 
Company  actually  fell  as  the  services  at  home  took  a  larger  share  of  the  pool. 
In  1754-1755,  the  Company  had  obtained  1,001  men,  but  a  year  later  only 
488  were  procured.  In  1759-1760,  only  202  men  were  found,  and  in  1761-1762 

19  Laver,  British  Military  Uniforms;  Samuel  Hutton,  "The  Life  of  an  Old  Soldier",  cited  in  Palmer, 
The  Rambling  Soldier,  pp.  15-17. 

20  Penny,  The  Traditions  of  Perth,  pp.  60-61. 

21  The  figures  we  have  for  the  1770s  suggest  that  the  lowest  price  was  1  guinea  per  man  (1776), 
but  in  wartime  (1777)  this  rose  to  5  or  6  guineas  per  man:  Committee  of  Shipping  Report  B92, 
3  December  1776,  IOR. 

22  Letter  by  "A.B.",  The  Public  Advertiser,  12  March  1771. 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


277 


this  had  fallen  to  197. 23  The  Company  Army  complained  that  too  few  were 
being  sent  to  maintain  their  regiments  and  they  had  to  turn  to  as  many 
Europeans  in  Bengal  as  they  could  find  to  remain  effective.24  In  1759,  the 
Court  of  Directors  admitted  it  was  "impossible"  to  provide  the  2,000  men 
required  by  the  army  in  India  because  it  was  experiencing  "the  greatest 
difficulties  in  raising  recruits".  They  directed  that  operations  should  be 
limited  to  the  manpower  available.25 

After  the  war,  gradually  there  were  changes  to  the  system.  In  1769,  the 
Company  was  permitted  to  raise  recruits  "by  beat  of  drum",  that  is,  by 
officially  advertising  rather  than  by  kidnapping,  and  was  also  empowered 
to  raise  a  regiment  in  Britain,  with  commissioned  officers.  Complete  units 
would  be  sent  out,  rather  than  "trickle-posting"  any  arrivals.  It  was  permit- 
ted that  up  to  a  third  of  the  regiment  could  consist  of  "foreign  protestants", 
but  there  was  a  deep  suspicion  of  enlisting  Catholics  or  Germans.26  Indeed, 
the  Company  directors  were  most  concerned  that  the  regiment  might  be 
answerable  only  to  the  British  government  and  could,  therefore,  threaten 
the  independence  of  the  Company  altogether.  Another  issue  was  cost:  for 
all  its  faults,  crimping  was  cheaper  than  regular  army  recruiting  or  paying 
vast  bounties,  and  the  Seven  Years  War  cost  the  Company  a  fortune. 

Regular  officers  in  Britain  were  equally  prejudicial  on  their  side  about  the 
new  arrangements.  They  argued  that  India  was  a  drain  on  manpower  which 
swallowed  up  men  who  should  be  deployed  in  the  defence  of  Britain.  One 
member  of  Parliament  likened  India  to  "a  sink".27  As  a  result,  the  reforms 
failed  and  the  system  reverted  to  crimps,  only  to  collapse  once  more  during 
the  American  War  of  Independence  until  it  was  decreed  that  Irishmen  might 
be  recruited  from  1781  onwards.  However,  standards  of  recruits  remained 
very  low,  and  some  were  actually  sent  back  to  Britain.  Figures  for  the  1790s, 
which  appear  to  be  typical  even  earlier  in  the  century,  suggest  a  rejection 
rate  of  10  per  cent.28  Some  were:  "particularly  incapable  of  carrying  the  load 
of  arms,  ammunition,  necessaries  and  provisions,  and  undergoing  hardships 
and  fatigues,  to  which  soldiers  to  be  useful;  [?]  to  the  public  must  necessarily 
submit".29  It  was  not  until  1799  that  the  practice  of  crimping  was  brought 

23  A.  J.  Farrington,  L/Mil/9/85,  IOR. 

24  Despatches  to  Bengal,  25  March  1757,  IOR. 

25  Despatches  to  Bengal,  1759,  IOR. 

26  Gilbert,  "Recruitment  and  Reform  in  the  East  Indian  Company  Army",  p.  98. 

27  London  Evening  Post,  16-18  April  1771. 

28  See  Colonel Brownrigg's  Inspection  Records,  1792,  WO  113/15:  National  Archives,  Kew. 

29  Court  of  Directors  Letter  to  Bengal,  enc.  Cornwallis  to  Directors,  15  December  1790,  L/Mil/ 
Misc/127,  IOR. 


278 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


to  an  end  and  recruitment  put  under  the  jurisdiction  of  the  regular  army.30 
However,  the  Company  remained  short  of  European  men  and  failed  to  fill 
its  own  quotas. 

The  organization,  management,  and  performance  of  the 
Company  Army 

In  his  account  of  the  fall  of  Calcutta  to  Siraj  ud-Daula,  the  nawab  of  Bengal, 
in  1756,  John  Holwell  noted  that  the  defences  were  manned  by  a  handful 
of  gunners  with  145  infantry  of  which,  in  total,  only  60  were  Europeans. 
The  militia  consisted  of  100  "Armenians",  who  were  "entirely  useless",  and 
a  further  100  Indian  "boys  and  slaves  who  were  not  capable  of  holding  a 
musket".31  He  estimated  that,  even  with  men  drafted  from  the  ships  in  port, 
the  garrison  numbered  only  250,  including  officers.  Predictably,  when  Siraj 
ud-Daula's  forces  came  into  view,  the  militia  deserted  and  some  Company 
officers  fled  to  the  ships.  The  standard  interpretation  of  the  war  is  that 
dramatic  improvements  were  made  to  the  quality  of  the  Indian  troops 
through  the  imposition  of  discipline  and  European  drill.  By  increasing 
manpower  and  quality,  the  British  were  able  to  turn  events  around.  How- 
ever, the  improvement  of  the  Indian  troops  was  only  part  of  the  formula: 
the  logistical  expertise  of  Stringer  Lawrence,  Vice  Admiral  Charles  Watson's 
amphibious  operations  up  the  Hooghly  River,  and  Robert  Clive's  leadership, 
intrigues,  and  personal  courage  were  crucial,  as  was  the  Company's  capacity, 
in  contrast  the  French  Company,  to  fund  the  conflict. 

The  improvements  had  begun  with  Stringer  Lawrence  in  Cuddalore  in 
1748.  He  imposed  strict  discipline  on  topasses  and  Europeans  alike  at  Fort  St 
David,  mindful  that  Madras  had  fallen  to  the  more  effective  French  forces. 
In  December  1758,  that  new  force  was  put  to  the  test  in  a  siege  at  Madras, 
and  endured  two  months  of  bombardment  and  more  than  a  thousand 
casualties  before  it  was  relieved.  But  it  was  also  the  growing  campaign- 
combat  experience  of  the  Company  troops  through  the  Carnatic  Wars 
that  made  the  greatest  difference.  New  units  could  draw  on  the  expertise 
of  veterans,  especially  junior  commanders,  and  apply  this  directly  to  their 

30  A  fascinating  contrast  can  be  made  with  the  Royal  Navy's  patterns  of  recruitment  in  the  late 
eighteenth  century.  New  research  by  Jeremiah  Dancy  suggests  that  "pressed  men"  constituted 
on  average  no  more  than  10  per  cent  of  the  crews  since  ships  required  skilled  labour.  The  decline 
of  crimping  coincides  with  the  disfavour  towards  impressments  in  the  Senior  Service:  Dancy, 
"British  Naval  Manpower  During  the  French  Revolutionary  Wars". 

31  Cited  in  Lenman,  Britain's  Colonial  Wars,  p.  106. 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


279 


training.  Clive's  sepoys  displayed  remarkable  endurance  when  besieged,  on 
campaign  marches  and  in  battle.  At  the  siege  of  Arcot,  for  example,  their 
morale  remained  intact  despite  a  steady  attrition  of  their  numbers,  and  in 
the  march  to  intercept  Dupleix  in  1752,  his  sepoys  made  50  miles  in  just 
twenty  hours,  covering  a  total  of  66  miles  in  thirty-six  hours  and  winning 
a  night  battle  at  Kaveripak  against  the  odds.  At  Volconda  (or  Golkonda) 
(29  May  1752),  a  force  made  up  almost  entirely  of  Indian  personnel  in  British 
service  charged  a  French  battery  and  their  supporting  infantry.  Despite 
taking  heavy  casualties,  the  sepoys  pressed  home  with  the  bayonet  and 
killed  or  captured  the  French,  which  suggests  that  their  discipline,  training, 
and  trust  in  their  junior  leadership  were  robust.  The  following  year,  Subadar 
Sheikh  Ibrahim,  without  any  British  support,  defended  his  battery  position 
against  a  Franco-Indian  force,  and  earned  a  significant  reward  from  the 
Company  for  his  devotion  to  duty.32  With  six  years  of  fighting  behind  them, 
with  improved  discipline  and  the  personalized  and  charismatic  leadership 
of  Lawrence,  Watson,  and  Clive,  the  Company  had  an  effective  sepoy  army 
with  naval  support  to  rival  the  French. 

After  the  Carnatic/Seven  Years  War,  greater  military  efficiency  in  Asian 
units  was  manifest  in  other  ways.  The  standards  of  British  recruits  coming 
to  India  showed  no  sign  of  improvement,  prompting  the  governor-general 
to  write:  "what  shall  I  say  of  the  Company's  Europeans  [soldiers]?  [...]  I 
would  infinitely  rather  take  the  73rd  [Native]  Regiment  upon  service  with 
me  than  the  six  Company's  battalions."33  Such  comments  have  to  be  seen 
in  context:  the  sentiments  maybe  exaggerated  because  of  a  sense  of  exas- 
peration. Nevertheless,  European  officers  were  aware  that  Indian  troops 
were  cheaper,  better  adapted  to  cope  with  the  demands  of  campaigning  in 
the  heat  and  humidity  of  South  Asia,  and,  when  trained  in  the  European 
manner,  capable  of  the  same  achievements. 

Although  there  had  been  only  companies  in  the  1740s,  it  was  decided  in 
1759  to  raise  battalions  of  Indian  troops  to  match  the  French  threat.  Two 
had  in  fact  already  been  formed,  but  an  additional  five  battalions  were 
mobilized.  By  the  end  of  the  war,  the  Company  Army's  establishment  was 
for  ten  battalions.  Each  battalion  consisted  of  nine  companies,  each  of  120 
men,  and  one  of  these  was  a  grenadier  company. 

In  Clive's  "Return  of  1757",  the  Indian  troops  are  recorded  as  having 
various  ranks  of  subadars;  jamadars;  havildars  and  naiks;  colour  (flag) 
men;  "Tom  Toms"  (drummers),  trumpeters,  and  "Seapoys".  It  had  been 

32  Mason,  A  Matter  of  Honour,  p.  38. 

33  Cornwallis  to  Dundas,  16  November  1787,  Home  Misc.  Series,  vol.  85,  IOR. 


280 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


assumed  in  the  1740s  that  Indian  ways  were  so  strange  that  only  Indian 
officers  could  command  Asian  troops  at  the  company  level.  Indeed,  the 
first  Indian  officers  were  really  contractors  who  served  as  recruiters  for  the 
men.  Loyalty  to  the  contractor  was  more  important  to  the  early  recruits 
than  to  the  Company.  But  new  contracts  in  the  1750s  changed  this.  Each 
man  was  made  aware  that  he  served  the  Company  and  was  paid  by  the 
Company.  In  November  1755,  regulations  stipulated  that  there  should  be 
one  subadar,  four  jamadars,  eight  havildars  (sergeants),  and  eight  naiks 
(corporals).  At  the  end  of  the  war,  this  establishment  of  Indian  leaders 
was  reduced  (one  subadar,  two  jamadars,  and  six  havildars  per  company) 
and  each  battalion  was  furnished  with  two  commissioned  officers,  three 
sergeant-majors  (Europeans),  and  a  "Black  Commandant".  However,  Mason 
noted  that  these  Europeans  were  in  little  more  than  a  supervisory  capacity 
or  there  to  maintain  numbers.  There  was  little  chance  of  promotion  as  a 
commander  in  an  Indian  battalion,  as  progression  could  only  be  made 
in  European  units.  They  were  to:  "make  them  keep  up  a  good  command 
amongst  the  sepoys  and  to  support  them  well  in  it".34  The  sergeant-majors 
were  to  have  "immediate  direction  of  three  of  the  companies"  and  were 
charged  to  take  "care  of  their  discipline".  Mason  suggested  that  the  non- 
commissioned officers  (NCOs)  were  the  backbone  of  the  Indian  units  and 
that  the  concept  of  gentlemanly  officers  had  not  yet  manifested  itself.  He 
also  argued  that  the  survival  of  the  "black  commandant"  was  testament  to 
the  importance  of  the  old  "reciprocal"  chieftain  system.  In  fact,  it  seems 
likely  that  the  commandant  was  an  adviser  to  the  Europeans  on  cultural 
matters  and  the  link  to  the  recruiting  base  on  which  the  battalion  depended. 

What  was  the  appeal  for  Indian  men  to  serve  in  the  Company  army? 
There  was  not  perhaps  the  strong  tradition  of  service  that  would  come  to 
characterize  the  Rajputs  in  British  formations  from  the  mid-nineteenth 
century.  What  the  British  could  offer  was  regular  pay  at  6  rupees  a  month.35 
Many  Indian  rulers  rarely  paid  their  men  more  than  eight  months  a  year, 
leading  to  widespread  brigandage,  but  even  this  salary  was  often  in  arrears 
and  siphoned  off  in  ghost  pay-rolling  by  intermediate  commanders.  The 
advantage  of  the  small  European  formations  was  that  it  made  corruption 
more  difficult.  The  Company  was  also  flexible  in  its  arrangements.  Sepoys 
of  South  India  were  permitted  to  take  their  families  along  with  them  to 
stations  and  garrisons  and  even  on  campaign.  Pay  advances  were  available, 
and,  as  early  as  1762,  sepoys  on  overseas  service  could  opt  to  have  a  portion 


34  Mason,  A  Matter  of  Honour,  p.  63. 

35  Lenman,  Britain's  Colonial  Wars,  p.  100. 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


281 


of  their  pay  delivered  directly  to  their  families.  Indians  could  pay  for  com- 
missions from  1763,  and  these  were  still  relatively  cheap  (a  week's  pay  in 
1763),  making  personal  advancement  possible  within  the  Company  Army. 

Many  European  soldiers,  enlisted  either  as  conscripts  or  volunteers, 
grumbled  about  having  their  pay  held  back  because  of  costs  they  had  to 
meet:  2d  here  and  2d  there  for  blankets,  boots,  cleaning  equipment,  and  ad- 
ditional or  extraordinary  rations.  Some  soldiers  wrote  about  not  being  able 
to  leave  the  service  because  of  indebtedness.  However,  this  was  not  always 
financial,  but  rather  a  matter  of  honour.  The  Indian  expression  having  to 
remain  "true  to  their  salt"  seems  to  have  pervaded  British  personnel  in  some 
cases  and  not  just  the  sepoys  of  the  Honourable  East  India  Company.  Such 
sentiments  would  have  taken  time  to  develop,  but  the  shared  isolation  of 
India,  regular  pay  and  continuous  employment,  and  the  camaraderie  of 
the  ranks  transformed  an  otherwise  alienating  experience  into  a  positive 
one.  In  other  words,  recruits  became  regular  soldiers  with  an  esprit  de 
corps,  and  a  professional  indifference  to  outsiders.  Oaths  of  loyalty  were  not 
introduced  until  1766,  but  they  appear  to  have  underpinned  some  existing 
understanding  about  service  in  the  Company  Army  and  how  it  related  to 
concepts  of  personal  honour.3*3  The  creation  of  battalions  led  to  the  adoption 
of  colours  and  these  were  incorporated  into  a  symbiosis  of  European  and 
South  Asian  rituals  to  create  a  bond  of  loyalty  and  possession.  Southern 
Indian  troops,  for  example,  thought  of  their  leaders  and  their  colours  as 
distinctly  and  uniquely  theirs. 

Did  the  Indian  infantry  in  Company  service  determine  the  outcome  of 
the  Carnatic  Wars  in  South  Asia?  What  assessment  can  be  made  of  their 
effectiveness?  It  was  once  assumed  that  the  British  possessed  technologi- 
cal superiority,  which  gave  them  the  edge  in  their  engagements  with  the 
Indian  states.  In  fact,  matchlocks  with  which  the  Indian  forces  were  armed 
had  a  higher  rate  of  fire  and  a  marginally  greater  range  than  the  flintlock, 
although  the  flintlock,  in  trained  hands,  could  sustain  the  same  rate  of  fire. 
Moreover,  the  French  forces  in  India  were  armed  with  the  same  weapon 
types  as  the  British.  Indeed,  within  a  few  years,  all  the  armies  in  India  were 
using  flintlocks. 

Certainly  the  British  made  extensive  use  of  light,  quick-firing,  manoeu- 
vrable artillery.  At  Trichinopoly  in  May  1754,  three  British  six-pounder 
guns  devastated  French  infantry  with  case-shot  at  close  range.  Roundshot 
ricocheting  through  dense  cavalry  also  warded  off  large  formations  of 
mounted  men.  Artillery  was  widely  available  in  South  Asia  but  many  guns 


36   Mason,  A  Matter  of  Honour,  p.  66. 


282 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


possessed  by  Indian  rulers  were  fixed  or  difficult  to  move,  and  there  was 
little  standardization  in  their  ammunition  or  calibres.  However,  while 
Indian  forces  failed  to  produce  guns  that  could  be  manoeuvred  easily, 
many  of  the  batteries  of  the  southern  rulers  were  staffed  by  European 
gunners.  At  Plassey,  for  example,  the  guns  of  Siraj  ud-Daula  were  directed 
by  French  artillerymen. 

The  differences  between  European  and  Indian  forces  were  really  more 
regular  organization  and  better  discipline,  which,  in  turn  meant  that,  on 
the  battlefield,  sepoys  and  European  troops  could  maintain  a  high  rate 
of  fire  and  sustain  casualties  without  losing  cohesion.  These  reflected 
a  particular  type  of  military  labour  organization.  Large  numbers  of  ill- 
disciplined  cavalry  or  poorly  armed  peasants,  led  by  individuals  who  merely 
wished  to  demonstrate  their  personal  courage,  failed  against  the  relentless 
machinery  of  European  warfare.  The  point  is  that  it  did  not  matter  whether 
the  forces  were  Europeans  or  not;  what  mattered  was  their  level  of  training, 
morale,  and  discipline.37  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  the  Marathas  adopted 
European  methods  to  create  a  disciplined  and  cohesive  army,  built  up  with 
mercenary  troops  including  Europeans  in  senior  positions,  and  they  too 
enjoyed  some  years  of  success  against  the  British.38 

In  R.O.  Cambridge 's  Account  of  the  War  in  India,  published  in  1772,  the  key 
reason  for  the  defeat  of  Indian  armies  by  the  Europeans  and  their  sepoys  was 
the  former's  neglect  of  infantry.  While  Indian  cavalry  were  perfectly  capable 
of  charging  against  other  horsemen,  they  tended  to  avoid  the  well-drilled 
Company  infantry  for  fear  of  losing  their  horses  on  which  their  wealth 
depended.  For  the  Company,  raising  and  training  infantry  was  cheaper  than 
cavalry,  and  the  infantry  could  hold  ports,  forts,  and  garrisons  as  well  as 
act  as  a  strike  force.39  Moreover,  if  supported  by  light  artillery,  infantrymen 
could  traverse  all  terrain  in  southern  India.  Certainly  the  labour  categories 
in  the  1757  Return  for  Plassey  indicate  that  all  the  troops  were  dismounted.40 

The  lack  of  cavalry  put  the  Company  at  a  disadvantage  in  terms  of  recon- 
naissance and  therefore  of  intelligence-gathering,  but  this,  if  anything, 
made  them  even  more  dependent  on  local  sources  of  power,  their  Indian 
allies,  and  intrigues  against  their  adversaries. 


37  Ibid.,  p.  40. 

38  Gordon,  The  Marathas:  1600-1818. 

39  Lenman,  Britain's  Colonial  Wars,  p.  96. 

40  Letters  by  Clive,  6  February  1757  ff.,  1962-10-142,  National  Army  Museum,  London. 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


283 


Comparative  analysis 

The  second  part  of  this  chapter  addresses  the  comparative  elements  of  the 
early  East  India  Company  army  in  terms  of  terms  of  service,  type  of  labour, 
type  of  army,  and  the  causal  drivers  of  the  rise,  dominance,  or  decline  of 
the  East  India  Company's  forms  of  military  labour. 

In  addressing  the  variables  in  military  labour  in  the  East  India  Company 
Army,  I  should  first  note  that  the  British  had  always  employed  local  labour 
in  India,  particularly  for  the  unskilled  tasks  associated  with  commerce  and 
with  the  security  of  their  factories,  stores,  and  godowns.  Defence  against 
more  numerous  Indian  forces  relied  largely  on  alliance  and  negotiations. 
The  inadequate  nature  of  peons  or  topasses  in  any  offensive  capacity, 
compared  with  disciplined  and  French  sepoys,  was  already  evident  before 
the  Seven  Years  War  broke  out,  and  so  it  is  perhaps  no  surprise  that  the 
British  enhanced  their  own  systems  to  deal  with  the  French  threat.  The 
result  was  a  larger  and  more  effective,  if  more  expensive,  Company  army 
and,  more  significantly  for  this  study,  a  transformation  in  the  character  of 
military  labour. 

In  the  terms  of  service  offered,  the  East  India  Company  barely  differenti- 
ated between  British  and  Indian  recruits.  Troops  were  paid  a  regular  wage 
in  return  for  military  service.  Rates  of  pay  were  low  but  were  comparatively 
better  in  real  terms  to  Indian  troops.  In  the  recruitment  of  topasses  and 
peons  for  garrison  duty,  the  rate  of  pay  was  high  enough  to  attract  some 
men  to  employment  but  appeared  to  be  lower  than  that  for  most  artisans. 
For  Europeans,  recruiters  in  Britain  would  target  men  who  perceived  their 
wages  to  be  too  low  and  offer  cash  inducements  and  bounties.  Nevertheless, 
the  Company  failed  to  attract  enough  men  to  maintain  its  regiments  in 
wartime  and  was  forced  to  pay  for  "crimps"  to  impress  manpower.  Crimping, 
despite  its  unpopularity,  proved  cheaper  than  trying  to  compete  in  the 
labour  market  against  civilian  artisan  wages.  British  soldiers  argued  that 
they  were  held  in  a  form  of  bondage  because  they  became  indebted  to  the 
Company  for  their  rations,  uniform,  and  equipment.  By  contrast,  Indian 
men  were  paid  a  regular  salary  that  proved  attractive  compared  with  the 
standard  practices  of  Indian  rulers  or  corrupt  commanders.  Indians  in 
British  service  could  transfer  salaries  to  families,  purchase  commissions, 
and  obtain  pay  advances. 

Soldiers'  duration  of  service  was  closely  related  to  the  issue  of  pay.  The 
topasses  who  garrisoned  Bombay  in  the  1740s  had  no  specified  age  limits 
for  service  and  consequently  some  were  quite  elderly.  European  soldiers 
were  all  considered  to  be  "long  service"  but  many  of  them  were  anxious  that 


284 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


diseases  might  kill  them  before  they  reached  the  end  of  their  service  anyway 
(the  death  rate  being  5  per  cent  across  the  army).  Nevertheless,  Indian  and 
British  personnel  shared  the  desire  to  take  up  regular  employment  and 
therefore  accepted  long  service  as  a  guarantee  of  work  and  wages. 

British  soldiers  in  Company  service  were  subjected  to  far  more  legal 
constraints  than  the  Indian  personnel,  in  terms  of  employment  parameters. 
The  Company  was  unable  to  compete  with  the  regular  British  Army  for 
its  recruits  in  the  United  Kingdom  for  many  years,  and  it  turned  to  the 
practice  of  crimping  as  a  direct  result  of  its  consequent  manpower  short- 
ages. The  illegal  nature  of  the  practice  was  ignored  by  British  authorities 
because  it  tended  to  sweep  up  the  elements  of  society  that  were  thought 
"undesirable".  The  imprisonment  of  recruits  before  transportation  to  India 
was  a  measure  to  offset  the  lack  of  legal  support  for  recruitment:  recruits 
were  not  subject  to  martial  law  and  would  therefore  have  simply  deserted 
at  the  first  opportunity.  However,  these  conditions  suggest  that  many  of 
the  British  soldiers  in  the  East  India  Company  army  could  be  categorized 
as  "conscript-slave". 

The  constraints  on  the  employment  of  Indian  troops  were  cultural  rather 
than  legal.  Caste  preferences  and  ethnic  prejudices  could  limit  the  type 
of  recruit  and  the  tasks  they  might  be  expected  to  perform.  The  British 
themselves  adopted  cultural  preferences  of  their  own,  although  pragmatism 
and  necessity  dictated  the  numbers  and  physique  of  the  recruits.  For  the 
European  troops  there  were  added  constraints:  a  desire  to  avoid  the  employ- 
ment of  too  many  Catholics  and  Germans,  for  example,  yet  an  acceptance 
of  criminals.  These  criteria  and  the  type  of  recruit  the  Company  managed 
to  employ  exasperated  the  officers  who  sought  greater  numbers,  efficiency, 
and  effectiveness. 

In  assessing  the  taxonomy  of  military  labour  in  the  East  India  Company 
Army,  it  is  necessary  to  categorize  their  types  and  variations.  While  forms 
of  military  labour  across  South  Asia  as  a  whole  were  very  mixed,  the  phe- 
nomenological  varieties  of  military  employment  are,  for  the  purposes  of 
comparison,  classified  here  according  to  two  criteria  of  either  un/free  labour 
and  un/commodified  labour,  and  the  subcategories  of  ethnic  (reciprocal 
labour);  enslaved  (tributary);  conscripted  (tributary);  mercenary  (corn- 
modified);  and  professional  (commodified).  In  addition,  military  labour 
in  the  East  India  Company  Army  is  assessed  against  the  taxonomies  of 
forces  that  are  feudal,  aggregate  contract,  state  commission,  conscript,  or 
modern  volunteer  armies.  This  chapter,  while  to  some  extent  following  John 
Lynn's  model  of  acknowledging  change  and  transformation,  also  addresses 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


285 


the  issue  of  typology  and  its  dominance,  locating  the  example  of  the  East 
India  Company  in  the  history  of  military  labour  embraced  by  this  volume. 

The  earliest  experiments  in  using  local  labour  by  the  East  India  Company 
were  not  a  success,  and  in  terms  of  categorization  we  might  identify  the 
first  "Rajpoot"  garrison  troops  as  "mercenary  ethnic"  although  the  Chris- 
tian converts  and  mestees  were  so  outcaste  in  Bombay  that  they  might  be 
described  as  "conscript  ethnic".  The  British  personnel  and  local  militia  of 
freeman  and  landholders  recruited  by  the  Company  in  Bombay  in  the  last 
decade  of  the  seventeenth  century  appear  to  fit  the  category  of  "mercenary" 
and  "mercenary  ethnic".  In  Madras  in  the  1740s,  the  3,000  peons  employed 
also  seem  to  fit  the  category  of  "mercenary  ethnic".  After  the  setbacks  of 
1746,  where  Madras  fell  to  the  French,  the  demand  for  manpower  increased 
but  there  was  no  change  to  the  type  of  South  Asian  military  labour:  the 
new,  expanded  force  was  still  "mercenary  ethnic"  in  character.  Garrison 
duties  and  the  protection  of  lines  of  communication  and  depots,  for  which 
these  new  forces  were  required,  did  not  necessitate  a  change  in  labour  type. 
They  were  raised  on  the  basis  of  being  a  cheap  and  barely  trained  force,  and 
consequently  the  quality  of  these  forces  was  low. 

However,  by  1753,  the  type  of  labour  was  in  the  process  of  changing 
to  "professional  ethnic".  Robert  Clive  introduced  standard  organization, 
intensive  training,  and  regular  pay.  The  seasoning  experience  of  being  on 
campaign  further  improved  the  quality  of  the  troops,  and  they  began  to 
develop  a  new  identity  of  professional  indifference  to  other  South  Asian 
forces  or  populations.  However,  we  should  guard  against  exaggerating 
the  change.  The  muster  returns  on  Clive's  forces  in  1757  indicate  that  the 
Company's  army  was  very  mixed:  while  a  significant  number  of  men  were 
categorized  as  trained  "seapoys",  there  were  still  garrison  troops  and  militia. 
In  the  1750s,  the  Company's  forces  remained  a  mix  of  "mercenary  ethnic" 
and  "professional  ethnic". 

The  further  complication  with  the  Indian  personnel  of  the  Company  army 
is  that,  throughout  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  recruits  were 
sometimes  offered  by  heads  of  families  and  these  soldiers  were  expected 
to  enlist  through  tradition.  These  men  might  be  regarded  as  "tributary 
enslaved"  labour  within  a  system  that  was  ostensibly  "mercenary"  and 
"commodified".  However,  it  is  also  clear  that,  after  the  success  of  Arcot  in 
1751  and  with  the  attraction  of  regular  pay,  some  personnel  came  forward 
as  volunteers.  Some  recruits  self-selected  on  the  basis  of  caste  or  ethnicity, 
although  the  Company  Army  remained  inclusive.  The  self-perception  of 
"professional  ethnic"  developed  through  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  but,  as  a  trait  throughout  South  Asia,  this  perspective  was  not 


286 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


limited  to  the  Company's  forces.  To  enhance  further  the  sense  of  profes- 
sional status  and  to  ensure  there  was  no  fraternization  with  indigenous 
populations,  the  Company  recruited  men  from  peripheral  regions  more 
frequently.  The  selection  of  former  hill-raiders  in  the  Terai  region  of  Bengal 
fit  within  this  design  of  creating  a  "professional  ethnic"  force,  but  the  men 
employed  in  the  Terai  case,  who  were  recruited  to  absorb  surplus  labour 
that  had  turned  to  crime,  might  be  regarded  as  a  category  of  "ethnic  slave". 

The  categorization  of  the  Company  army  is  problematized  still  further 
by  the  British  personnel.  Officers  were  generally  "professional-mercenary" 
in  their  employment,  although  some  used  enlistment  merely  as  the  means 
to  gain  access  to  civilian  commercial  opportunities  in  South  Asia,  and 
therefore  regarded  themselves  as  "free"  and  "uncommodified"  labour. 
Soldiers  were  far  more  complex.  Those  pressed  into  service  by  aristocratic 
landowners  through  local  businessmen  or  other  intermediaries  were  es- 
sentially induced  to  enlist  against  their  will,  and  therefore  were  "enslaved". 
Crimping  and  kidnapping  also  fall  into  this  taxonomy.  Others  were  lured 
into  the  army  by  the  chance  of  better  pay  or  opportunities  and  might  be 
classed  as  "mercenary".  The  fact  that  up  to  a  third  of  personnel  could  be 
recruited  from  foreign,  that  is  European,  and  sectarian  sources  suggests 
that  a  portion  of  the  army  could  be  classed  as  "mercenary  ethnic".  Service 
for  long  periods  overseas,  for  those  that  remained  or  survived  the  ravages 
of  climate  and  disease,  led  to  the  steady  professionalization  of  the  troops. 
Re-enlistment,  or  the  service  of  these  long-term  "professionals",  needs  to  be 
considered  as  other  elements  of  the  Company  Army  in  this  period. 

What  emerges  is  an  army  of  Asians  and  Europeans  that  was  in  a  period 
of  transition.  Indian  personnel  shifted  from  "mercenary  ethnic"  to  "profes- 
sional ethnic",  while  British  troops  broadly  changed  from  "enslaved"  to 
"professional"  in  service  but  remained  "enslaved"  or  "mercenary"  as  recruit 
types  for  most  of  the  century.  Yet,  the  Company  Army  remained  a  mixed 
force,  its  types  dependent  on  tasking  as  either  a  field  army  or  garrison 
troops.  The  army  overall  was  dependent  on  sources  of  labour  supply,  low 
in  Britain  but  abundant  in  India,  and  offered  terms  of  service  that  were 
considered  bad  in  Britain  but  attractive  in  South  Asia. 

Finally,  we  must  make  some  assessment  of  the  emergence  and  domi- 
nance of  the  forms  of  military  labour  in  the  East  India  Company  Army. 
The  reasons  for  the  change  in  the  form  of  military  labour  in  this  period  can 
be  summarized  as  a  shift  in  the  supply  and  demand  in  the  military  labour 
market;  ideological  factors  (on  the  British  side);  financial  and  economic 
pressures;  and  changes  in  the  military-strategic  situation  in  South  Asia. 
While  it  is  somewhat  artificial  to  attempt  to  attribute  to  each  of  these 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


287 


elements  a  greater  or  lesser  significance,  since  all  are  interdependent,  it 
was  the  military-strategic  situation  that  set  in  motion  changes  in  the  form 
and  structure  of  the  East  India  Company's  military  labour. 

The  fundamental  insecurity  of  the  Company's  position  in  South  Asia,  in 
part  caused  by  the  decay  of  the  Mogul  Empire  and  in  part  by  the  rivalry  and 
competition  of  European  and  Asian  agents,  necessitated  a  more  effective 
security  force.  Attempts  to  create  a  compact  that  prevented  the  French 
and  the  British  Companies  from  going  to  war  with  each  other,  even  if  there 
were  "Troubles"  in  Europe,  had  failed  by  1755.  Furthermore,  the  East  India 
Company  could  not  rely  entirely  on  bilateral  agreements  with  local  rulers, 
as  Siraj  ud-Daula  demonstrated  in  1756.  The  subsequent  security  provided  by 
the  Company's  fortresses  and  new  troops  acted  as  a  magnet  for  the  traders 
and  peasants  around  Bombay  and  Madras,  and  in  some  cases  these  popula- 
tions provided  services,  Company  servants,  and  troops.  The  Maratha  raids 
and  the  siege  of  Madras  in  1741  nevertheless  underscored  the  vulnerability 
of  the  British  factories  and  their  dependence  on  maritime  support. 

It  was  the  French  attack  on  Madras  in  1746,  launched  by  1,100  Europeans 
and  800  French  sepoys  against  a  garrison  of  200  barely  trained  militia,  that 
spurred  the  Company  to  improve  its  security  and  release  the  necessary 
capital.  Fort  St  David  was  saved  only  by  the  intervention  of  the  Royal  Navy 
in  1748,  and  it  seemed  that  the  Company  was  clinging  to  its  possessions  by 
its  fingernails.  Lawrence's  rapid  training  of  a  sepoy  force  enabled  him  to 
achieve  a  small  but  significant  victory  at  Cuddalore.  Dupleix,  in  command 
of  Pondicherry,  used  3,000  sepoys  to  defend  the  town  against  a  British  am- 
phibious operation  led  by  Admiral  Edward  Boscawan  in  1748,  but  the  British 
already  had  3,500  sepoys  in  their  own  force  to  augment  their  relatively  small 
European  contingent.  By  1752,  when  Lawrence  surrounded  the  French  at 
Sriringham  Island,  the  Company  had  a  large  and  experienced  force  of  Indian 
troops  led  by  equally  seasoned  officers.  By  the  end  of  the  war,  there  were 
ten  Indian  battalions  in  Madras  alone,  representing  a  force  approaching 
10,000  men.  With  the  infantry  came  the  mobile  British  artillery  that  could 
fire  faster  and  with  greater  reliability  than  any  Asian  equivalent. 

To  support  this  apparatus,  the  Company  marshalled  its  finances  care- 
fully, while  the  fortunes  of  the  French  Compagnie  des  Indes  dwindled. 
Nevertheless,  the  demands  of  war  tended  to  push  the  Company  officers 
towards  further  conquest  to  meet  the  costs  and  realize  the  wealth  in  Mysore, 
Arcot,  Trichinopoly,  and  Tanjore.  Clive  acknowledged  that  control  of  these 
territories  and  their  land  revenue  was  "what  we  are  contending  for"  in  the 
conflict,  which  has  subsequently  been  termed  "military-fiscalism".  The  war 


288 


ROBERT  JOHNSON 


had  "militarized"  the  Company  in  Madras  and  set  up  a  model  which  was 
to  be  replicated  in  Bengal. 

The  fall  of  Calcutta  further  necessitated  an  expansion  of  the  Company's 
security  forces.  Watson  and  Clive  launched  an  aggressive  campaign  to 
recover  the  city  and  then  to  take  the  fight  deep  into  Bengal.  Again  the 
navy's  support  was  vital,  but  the  decisive  element  was  Clive's  exploitation 
of  the  resentment  of  Siraj  ud-Daula  by  Mir  Jafar,  his  chief  of  staff,  and  his 
subsequent  defection  at  Plassey. 

Financial  considerations  had  formerly  limited  the  size,  form,  and  quality 
of  the  Company's  military  labour  but  the  necessity  for  more  manpower 
and  greater  efficiency  on  operations  in  the  1750s  came  to  override  the 
desire  for  economy.  In  the  case  of  European  personnel,  the  difficulties  of 
raising  sufficient  numbers  of  men,  made  worse  by  the  wastage  of  disease, 
remained  constant  throughout  the  period,  but  it  proved  far  easier  and 
more  cost-effective  to  enlist  larger  numbers  of  Asian  troops.  Wastage  rates 
among  Asian  personnel  were  also  lower.  Moreover,  the  terms  and  condi- 
tions of  service  were  regarded  as  unsatisfactory  by  British  troops  whereas 
indigenous  personnel  embraced  opportunities  for  regular  pay. 

The  "ideological"  element  of  the  British  approach  to  military  labour  is 
problematic.  A  comparative  study  of  the  situation  in  Great  Britain  and 
in  India  in  the  eighteenth  century  reveals  the  universal  assumptions  the 
British  brought  with  them  about  recruitment  and  the  practical  demands 
for  manpower,  diminishing  notions  of  a  specifically  "Orientalist"  approach 
in  the  subcontinent.  At  the  same  time,  the  diversity  of  the  regions  the 
British  encountered,  separated  as  they  were  by  distinct  cultures  and 
customs,  forced  the  British  to  adapt  their  practices.  They  did  so  in  an 
entirely  pragmatic  fashion  to  achieve  the  primary  objective  of  asserting 
their  supremacy  and  maintaining  good  order.  While  the  British  always 
favoured  physically  tall  and  robust  recruits  from  rural  areas,  they  put  more 
emphasis  on  discipline,  drill,  and  endurance.  Experienced  officers  and 
NCOs  were  preferred,  but  this  was  not  limited  to  Europeans.  The  Company 
army  was  not  deployed  only  against  the  French,  although  this  had  been  the 
priority  in  the  1740s  and  1750s.  The  army  was  required  to  protect  vulnerable 
lines  of  communication  and  garrison  conquered  areas  to  ensure  internal 
security.  In  Scotland,  the  senior  officers  of  the  army  apparently  regarded 
recruitment  as  a  tool  to  employ  and  therefore  absorb  excess  manpower 
in  marginal  areas  to  prevent  civil  disorder.  The  same  practice  may  have 
influenced  them  in  India.  However,  it  is  clear  that  they  placed  loyalty  high 
on  their  agenda,  and  believed  governments  had  to  make  their  presence 
felt  within  their  territories  to  discourage  rioting,  rebellion,  and  raiding. 


"TRUE  TO  THEIR  SALT" 


289 


In  India,  they  maintained  this  framework,  but  increasingly  paid  attention 
to  local  systems  of  patronage  and  adapted  recruitment  accordingly.  It  was 
perhaps  significant  that  the  commander  of  the  Madras  Presidency  Army 
was  Yusuf  Khan,  a  low-caste  Hindu  who  had  converted  to  Islam,  embraced 
the  Company,  and  rose  rapidly  through  the  ranks. 

Indian  recruits  enlisted  with  a  set  of  cultural  norms  which  the  Com- 
pany embraced  and  incorporated  into  their  army,  even  though  they  often 
misunderstood  and  misinterpreted  the  nature  of  local  societies.  While 
some  attempts  were  made  to  "Europeanize"  their  drill  and  appearance,  the 
Company  agreed  to  recognize  the  ideas  of  "warrior  castes"  and  incorporated 
local  expectations  and  rituals,  filtered  through  the  lens  of  expectations 
formed  by  British  cultural  norms.  This  ability  to  transcend  their  own 
ideological  parameters  and  create  a  new  synthesis  of  identity  among  their 
military  personnel  proved  to  be  an  enduring  strength  of  the  Company 
Army,  but  its  neglect  and  erosion  were  a  source  of  anger  and  frustration 
that  contributed  to  the  outbreak  of  the  Mutiny  in  1857. 

The  conclusion  that  might  be  drawn  on  the  character  of  the  sepoy  army 
in  the  Carnatic  Wars  is  that  it  was  recruited  out  of  necessity  and  emer- 
gency, and  was  certainly  modelled  on  the  French  system,  but  was  really 
a  pragmatic  response  to  an  enhanced  strategic  threat,  the  need  to  keep 
down  costs,  and  the  availability  of  a  pool  of  manpower.  The  significance 
of  the  Indian  troops  can  be  exaggerated  and  authors  have  tended  to  focus 
on  it  because  of  its  later  proud  history,  or  because  it  appeared  to  become 
the  instrument  of  imperial  oppression.  In  fact,  it  was  one  tool  -  alongside 
the  Company's  wealth,  the  initiative  of  its  local  leaders,  and  the  presence 
of  the  Royal  Navy  -  that  helped  to  neutralize  its  European  and  Asian  rivals. 
The  purpose  of  the  army  was  to  fulfil  the  tasks  of  the  East  India  Company, 
namely  the  acquisition  of  trade  and  land  revenue. 


"The  scum  of  every  county,  the  refuse  of 
mankind" 


Recruiting  the  British  Army  in  the  eighteenth  century 
Peter  Way 

"There  are  two  ways  of  recruiting  the  British  army",  wrote  Campbell  Dal- 
rymple  in  his  1761  military  manual, 

the  first  and  most  eligible  [best]  by  volunteers,  the  last  and  worst  by  a 
press.  By  the  first  method,  numbers  of  good  men  are  enrolled,  but  the 
army  is  greatly  obliged  to  levity,  accident,  and  the  dexterity  of  recruit- 
ing officers  for  them;  by  the  second  plan,  the  country  gets  clear  of  their 
banditti,  and  the  ranks  are  filled  up  with  the  scum  of  every  county,  the 
refuse  of  mankind.  They  are  marched  loaded  with  vice,  villainy,  and 
chains,  to  their  destined  corps,  where,  when  they  arrive,  they  corrupt 
all  they  approach,  and  are  whipt  out,  or  desert  in  a  month.1 

In  times  of  war,  the  fiscal-military  state's  appetite  for  soldiers  proved  vora- 
cious.2 The  strength  of  the  British  Army  in  the  Seven  Years  War  swelled  from 
roughly  31,000  men  to  117,000  (on  paper  or  93,000  in  effective  strength)  from 
1755  to  1762,  with  the  army  in  America  accounting  for  30,000  of  these  troops 
at  its  peak  strength.3  This  did  not  include  the  numerous  provincial  troops 
of  the  colonies,  which  numbered  from  nearly  10,000  to  in  excess  of  20,000 


1  Dairy  mple,  A  Military  Essay,  p.  8. 

2  Military  mobilization  constituted  the  greatest  enterprise  in  European  societies  at  this  time. 
The  armies  of  the  main  European  military  powers,  France,  Spain,  the  Habsburg  Empire,  Prussia, 
and  Russia,  often  reached  into  the  hundreds  of  thousands  in  times  of  war.  John  Childs  estimated 
that  in  1756,  for  example,  Austria's  army  numbered  201,000,  France's  330,000,  Russia's  330,000, 
Prussia's  143,000,  and  Britain's  91,179.  Even  relatively  small  states  fielded  sizeable  armies,  such 
as  Hesse-Cassel  (16,500),  Hanover  (29,000),  and  Wiirttemberg  (12,000).  In  total,  fourteen  states 
fielded  1,300,000  men,  and  this  prior  to  full  mobilization  for  the  Seven  Years  War.  See  Childs, 
Armies  and  Warfare  in  Europe,  p.  42. 

3  Conway,  War,  State,  and  Society,  pp.  56-59;  Pargellis,  "The  Four  Independent  Companies 
of  New  York";  Selesky,  War  and  Society  in  Colonial  Connecticut,  p.  m.  See  also  Lucassen  and 
Lucassen,  "The  Mobility  Transition  in  Europe  Revisited",  p.  76. 


292 


PETER  WAY 


men  in  any  given  year  during  the  war.4  The  combined  figure  of  40,000  to 
50,000  should  be  doubled  to  arrive  at  total  combatants  when  considering 
losses  due  to  battlefield  casualties,  victims  of  disease  or  accident,  desertion, 
and  the  end  of  service  terms.  These  numbers  were  no  small  matter  for  any 
society,  especially  considering  that  the  overwhelming  majority  of  recruits 
came  from  Britain.5 

The  British  Army  of  the  eighteenth  century  had  become  a  modern  vol- 
unteer force,  with  a  number  of  qualifications.  Impressment  (i.e.,  conscrip- 
tion) was  the  most  significant  departure,  although  it  only  ever  generated  a 
distinct  minority  of  soldiers.  Britain  also  relied  on  mercenary  forces  hired 
from  independent  German  polities,  largely  to  fight  for  its  interests  on  the 
continent,  but  also  in  the  American  Revolution  across  the  Atlantic.  The 
army  arrived  at  this  particular  configuration  as  the  result  of  a  number  of 
long-term  historical  processes,  the  first  being  political  in  nature.  Through- 
out the  seventeenth  century,  England  engaged  in  ongoing  internal  conflict 
and  regime  change  -  civil  war,  regicide,  creation  of  the  Commonwealth, 
restoration  of  the  monarchy,  and  revolution  -  that  occupied  it  at  home. 
But  with  the  defeat  of  the  Stuarts,  pacification  of  Ireland,  union  with 
Scotland,  and,  ultimately,  succession  of  the  Hanoverian  regime  it  secured 
its  domestic  sphere  (excepting  several  Jacobite  uprisings),  and  expanded 
its  human  resources  that  could  be  turned  from  the  plow  to  the  sword. 
Secondly,  the  changes  in  military  tactics,  technology,  and  scale  associated 
with  the  military  revolution  and  the  rise  of  the  fiscal-military  state  stoked 
European  wars.  Late  to  join  in  this  acceleration  of  armed  conflict,  Britain 
in  the  eighteenth  century  became  a  leading  player,  fielding  ever-larger 
armies  and  constructing  a  state  capable  of  combating  continental  powers. 

Most  profoundly,  the  economic  and  social  transformations  associated 
with  the  transition  to  capitalism  positioned  Britain  at  the  forefront  of 
modernity  in  terms  of  waging  war.  The  conversion  of  agriculture  and 
landholding  patterns  to  commercial  production,  the  expansion  of  handi- 
craft industries  through  the  reorganization  of  production,  the  tapping  of 
global  trade  through  the  creation  of  commercial  trading  companies  and 
expansion  of  the  merchant  fleet,  and  the  establishment  of  colonies  rich 
in  raw  materials  substantially  enhanced  the  productivity  of  Britain's 
economy,  enabling  it  to  fund  grossly  expensive  wars.  At  the  same  time, 

4  For  the  numbers  of  provincial  troops  requested  and  the  number  to  actually  take  the  field 
between  1759  and  1762,  see  The  Journal  of Jeffery  Amherst,  pp.  327-331. 

5  Conway  estimates  that  147,000  men  from  Britain  and  Ireland  served  in  the  regular  army 
during  the  Seven  Years'  War:  War,  State,  and  Society,  p.  65. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


293 


these  developments,  by  pushing  many  agricultural  laborers  off  the  land 
through  enclosure  and  changes  to  agricultural  practices,  as  well  as  many 
artisans  out  of  the  trades  due  to  the  inexorable  deskilling  of  the  crafts, 
created  a  proletariat  with  nothing  but  their  labor  to  sell,  and  in  times  of 
war  the  army  proved  an  insatiable  consumer  of  labor.  Furthermore,  states 
fought  wars  of  an  increasingly  commercial  nature  to  maximize  national 
wealth  through  the  defense  of  home  industries,  the  protection  of  trade,  and 
the  acquisition  of  colonies,  their  resources,  and  peoples.  Warfare  intimately 
intertwined  with  developing  capitalism,  and  military  recruitment  played 
a  key  role  in  the  freeing  of  labor  power  to  work  in  the  interests  of  capital. 
Mobilization  functioned  as  a  component  of  the  process  of  the  "primitive 
accumulation"  of  capital  (to  use  Marx's  term),  which  acted  to  "free"  laborers 
from  traditional  economic  relationships,  alienate  them  from  control  of  the 
means  of  production,  and  harness  their  labor  to  commercial  activity  that 
benefited  others. 

The  soldiers'  story  forms  part  of  a  broader  proletarian  tale,  but  it  is  also 
specific  to  military  workers.  And,  in  the  case  of  the  British  Army,  even  that 
is  not  a  single  tale  but  one  with  many  plots  as  Britain  pulled  together  diverse 
peoples  from  its  dominions  through  force,  inducements,  or  lack  of  other 
options.  Soldiers  came  from  specific  historical  backgrounds  character- 
ized by  particular  economic  and  social  relationships,  which  recruitment 
necessarily  disrupted,  not  only  for  the  individual  recruit  but  also  for  the 
community  from  which  the  army  extracted  him.  By  the  time  of  the  Seven 
Years  War,  market  forces  obtained  in  England  and  Wales,  Scotland,  and 
Ireland,  albeit  in  varying  configurations,  making  their  populations  recep- 
tive to  recruitment  and  giving  the  British  Army  its  modern  complexion.  In 
the  American  colonies,  however,  the  economy  had  not  developed  to  this 
extent  and  labor  scarcity  prevailed,  meaning  fewer  men  proved  receptive 
to  long-term  service  in  the  regular  army  and  recruitment  met  with  outright 
resistance,  in  a  foreshadowing  of  the  Revolution,  although  many  joined  the 
colonial  forces  on  yearly  enlistments  as  a  means  of  accumulating  capital  for 
their  own  economic  advancement.  More  than  a  simple  contract  between 
an  individual  and  institution,  states,  societies,  cultures,  and  communities 
negotiated  military  labor.  The  fiscal-military  state  thus  played  an  important 
role  in  the  economic  transformation  of  England  and  its  satellites  through 
its  harnessing  of  human  labor  to  national  warmaking  in  the  interest  of 
commercial  economic  activity. 


294 


PETER  WAY 


Mobilization 

Military  mobilization  in  the  early  modern  era  occurred  in  three  ways. 
States  commissioned  noblemen  to  raise  a  stipulated  number  of  troops  or 
contracted  fighting  units  from  foreign  military  enterprisers,  but  neither  pro- 
vided it  with  direct  control  of  the  fighting  force.  Finally,  the  state  compelled 
men  to  fight  through  pressing  those  without  apparent  employment,  crimi- 
nals, and  convicts,  or  by  imposing  a  levy  on  districts  or  cities  to  field  a  set 
number  of  men,  a  procedure  that  met  with  resistance  due  to  its  involuntary 
nature.  By  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century,  however,  the  modern  form 
of  mobilization  had  emerged,  in  which  the  nation-state  directly  raised  and 
administered  a  standing  army.  In  central  and  eastern  Europe,  particularly 
in  Prussia,  centralized  systems  of  conscription  developed  which  essentially 
coerced  military  labor  in  wartime,  whereas  the  Habsburg  territories,  France, 
and  Spain  relied  more  extensively  on  volunteers  to  stock  their  armies.6 

The  British  came  to  depend  upon  volunteers  due  in  part,  paradoxically, 
to  its  unpopularity.  The  army's  role  in  the  Civil  War  and  English  Revolution 
engendered  a  fear  that  the  military  posed  a  potential  threat  to  the  civil 
power  and  rights  of  Englishmen  that  had  to  be  kept  in  check.  The  often- 
unscrupulous  operations  of  regular  recruiting  parties,  and  the  periodic 
adoption  of  press  acts  during  wartime  alienated  many.  To  help  ease  these 
fears  the  standing  army  relied  upon  annual  parliamentary  enabling  legisla- 
tion by  a  Mutiny  Act,  while  the  civil  power  regulated  recruitment,  and 
adopted  conscription  only  in  times  of  need.7 

Recruits  usually  received  a  cash  bounty  from  which  to  purchase  a  shirt 
and  shoes.  Recruits  were  acquainted  with  the  articles  of  war  and,  according 
to  the  Mutiny  Act,  had  to  be  brought  before  a  justice  of  the  peace  or  consta- 
ble more  than  twenty-four  hours  after  but  within  four  days  of  enlistment  to 
attest  to  their  willingness  to  join  the  army.  If  a  recruit  denied  his  willingness 
to  serve  he  had  to  repay  the  money  he  had  received  upon  enlisting  as  well 
as  a  penalty  of  20  shillings  for  costs  incurred  by  the  recruiting  party.  Once 
the  party  had  gathered  a  body  of  recruits,  they  took  them  to  a  recruiting 
depot  or  back  to  the  regiment.  Competition  among  regiments  for  troops  and 
the  uncoordinated  nature  of  regiment-based  recruiting  made  recruiting 

6  Redlich,  The  German  Military  Enterpriser  and  His  Work  Force;  Parker,  The  Army  of  Flanders 
and  the  Spanish  Road,  pp.  29-39;  Childs,  Armies  and  Warfare  in  Europe,  pp.  49-54;  Anderson, 
War  and  Society  in  the  Old  Regime,  pp.  16-32;  Wilson,  German  Armies,  p.  277;  Black,  European 
Warfare  7660-7875,  pp.  218-224. 

7  Childs,  "The  Restoration  of  the  Army  1660-1702",  p.  53;  Steppler,  "The  Common  Soldier  in 
the  Reign  of  George  III",  pp.  1-3. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


295 


in  England  difficult.  Death,  desertion,  drafting  into  other  regiments,  and 
discharges  meant  the  necessity  of  constant  recruitment.  J.A.  Houlding 
calculated  that  the  regiments  stationed  in  the  British  Isles  had  to  recruit 
1.5  per  cent  of  their  strength  on  a  monthly  basis  during  peacetime,  and 
2.1  per  cent  in  wartime.  Thus,  regiments  often  found  it  hard  to  get  enough 
men  to  maintain  their  strength.  Some  recruited  year-round,  establishing 
depots  and  having  recruiters  on  permanent  duty.  Others  turned  to  "crimps", 
private  individuals  paid  by  regiments  to  perform  recruiting  in  the  stead  of 
a  formal  military  recruiting  party.  Recruiters  and,  especially,  crimps  who 
had  a  vested  economic  interest  in  producing  recruits,  did  not  scruple  at 
kidnapping  men  and  spiriting  them  away  to  military  service.8 

The  British  state  also  coerced  men  into  the  army,  adopting  impressment 
during  every  major  war  of  the  eighteenth  century,  although  it  functioned  in 
a  more  limited  fashion  than  did  the  naval  press  gang.  Civil  magistrates  and 
constables  oversaw  impressment,  which  targeted  (in  the  words  of  the  first 
Press  Act  of  1756)  "able  bodied  Men  as  do  not  follow  or  exercise  any  lawful 
Calling  or  Employment,  or  have  not  some  lawful  and  sufficient  Support". 
Such  men  would  be  brought  before  the  commissioners  to  determine  if  they 
were  suitable  for  impressment,  the  officials  receiving  payment  for  each  man 
pressed.  Owning  property  or  possessing  the  right  to  vote  protected  one 
from  the  press,  as  did  providing  a  substitute.  Having  a  large  family,  being 
too  old  or  infirm,  bearing  a  good  character,  or  having  friends  in  high  places 
could  extricate  a  man  from  service;  a  bad  reputation  or  lack  of  employment 
doomed  him  to  the  army.9 

The  Newcastle  ministry  by  the  end  of  1755  had  decided  to  raise  ten  new 
regiments  as  the  Seven  Years  War  loomed,  and  the  need  for  these  addi- 
tional forces  became  more  urgent  in  1756  when  fears  of  a  French  invasion 
heightened.  With  the  numbers  of  volunteers  seemingly  dwindling,  Parlia- 
ment passed  a  Press  Act  in  March  1756,  but  the  Privy  Council  suspended  it 
within  a  month  as  the  invasion  threat  had  incited  enough  men  to  volunteer. 

8  Steppler,  "The  Common  Soldier  in  the  Reign  of  George  III",  pp.  8-18;  Frey,  The  British  Soldier 
in  America,  pp.  3-4;  Childs,  The  British  Army  of  William  III,  pp.  108-114;  Middleton,  "The  Recruit- 
ment of  the  British  Army",  p.  228;  Brewer,  Sinews  of  Power,  pp.  49-50;  Houlding,  Fit  for  Service, 
pp.  125-126. 

9  Press  Act  cited  in  Middleton,  "The  Recruitment  of  the  British  Army",  p.  229;  Brewer,  The 
Sinews  of  Power,  pp.  49-50;  Henry  Moore,  "A  return  of  men  inlisted  at  Guil[d]ford  in  the  County 
of  Surr[e]y  by  the  Commissioners  and  Justices",  10  April  1756,  no.  1035,  box  23  Loudoun  Papers, 
North  American,  Manuscript  Department,  Henry  E.  Huntington  Library,  San  Marino,  California 
[henceforth,  in  form  LO1035/23];  Gilbert,  "Charles  Jenkinson  and  the  Last  Army  Press",  p.  7, 
"Army  Impressment  during  the  War  of  the  Spanish  Succession". 


296 


PETER  WAY 


However,  by  August  upon  further  expansion  of  the  army,  it  soon  became 
clear  the  number  of  volunteers  had  dwindled,  and  the  government  adopted  a 
new  Press  Act.  This  act  proved  less  successful,  and  in  1757  political  pressure 
made  Pitt  abandoned  it.10  Yet  London,  for  example,  yielded  500  pressed  men 
in  1756  for  service  in  the  35th  Regiment  alone.  Coerced  soldiers  tended, 
not  surprisingly,  to  be  less  enthusiastic  about  military  life,  often  deserting 
from  the  transports  before  sailing  and  upon  arrival  in  America.  Loudoun 
reported  of  the  35th's  "raw"  troops,  "the  prest  Men,  I  dare  not  yet  trust 
so  near  the  enemy",  as  he  had  six  desert  to  the  French  together,  two  of 
whom  were  discovered  starving  in  the  woods  and  promptly  hanged.11  The 
army  also  took  up  reluctant  troops  in  other  manners.  People  convicted  of  a 
crime  received  pardons  contingent  on  enlisting  in  the  army.  Thus,  William 
Desborough,  found  guilty  of  stealing  sheep  in  November  1760  and  sentenced 
to  death  at  Huntingdon,  earned  a  pardon  by  enlisting  in  a  regiment  of  foot. 
Similarly  John  Baker,  Jeremiah  Smith,  Charles  Dailey,  and  Thomas  Elliott, 
sentenced  to  death  for  highway  robbery  at  Maidstone  that  same  month, 
received  pardons  predicated  upon  joining  the  49th  Regiment  in  Jamaica, 
which  often  equated  to  a  delayed  form  of  capital  punishment  due  to  the 
high  mortality  rate  resulting  from  tropical  diseases  in  the  West  Indies.12 

The  Duke  of  Wellington,  military  hero  of  the  Napoleonic  wars,  famously 
referred  to  his  troops  as  "the  scum  of  the  earth".13  Such  a  negative  perspec- 
tive not  only  mirrored  the  point  of  view  of  British  soldiers;  it  also  persists 
today  among  some  historians  of  the  army.14  Such  classist  language  not  only 
insults  its  subject;  it  also  prevents  any  serious  engagement  with  the  social 
background  of  soldiers  or  the  historical  processes  by  which  they  came  to 
serve  in  the  army.  Lumping  them  together  as  the  residue  at  the  bottom  of 
society  excuses  military  historians  from  conceptualizing  these  men  as 
either  historical  agents  or  victims  of  power  structures;  they  become  merely 

10  Middleton,  "The  Recruitment  of  the  British  Army",  pp.  228-230;  Gilbert,  "Charles  Jenkinson 
and  the  Last  Army  Press",  p.  7;  Gilbert,  "An  Analysis  of  Some  Eighteenth  Century  Army  Recruiting 
Records",  p.  39. 

11  Maj.  Henry  Fletcher,  "A  Return  of  a  Detachment;  Impressed  Men;  and  Recruits  of  His 
Majesties  [sic]  Thirty  Fifth  regiment  of  Foot",  4  Sep.  1756,  LO2774/44;  Loudoun  to  Daniel  Webb, 
27  March  1756,  London,  LO974/21;  [Loudoun]  to  Colonel  Burton,  17  Sep.  1756,  LO1828/41;  [Loud- 
oun] To  the  Duke  of  Cumberland,  3  Oct.  1756,  LO1968/44. 

12  Calendar  of  Home  Office  Papers  of  the  Reign  of  George  III,  p.  13. 

13  Henry,  Notes  of  Conversations  with  the  Duke  of  Wellington,  p.  14. 

14  For  example,  Chandler  and  Beckett,  the  editors  of  The  Oxford  History  of  the  British  Army, 
purport:  "Soldiers  were  inevitably  recruited  from  the  dregs  of  society  [...]  The  unattractive 
features  of  service  life  which  persisted  until  the  very  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  were  not 
conducive  to  recruiting  the  more  respectable  elements  of  society"  (p.  xvi). 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


297 


soldiers,  units  of  a  more  important  whole,  subsumed  within  histories  of  the 
army  that  assume  nationalist  discourses.  Dalrymple,  at  least,  captured  the 
distinction  between  "good  men"  who  volunteered  and  the  pressed  "scum  of 
every  county",  though  the  class  bias  of  an  army  officer  still  came  through. 
Closer  attention  to  the  backgrounds  of  recruits,  however,  reveals  a  martial 
workforce  that  neatly  mirrored  the  laboring  classes  of  the  era,  making 
soldiers  more  the  salt  of  the  earth  than  its  scum. 

The  common  conception  of  soldiers  presumed  they  hailed  from  the 
rootless  mass  that  willingly  lived  idle  and  unproductive  lives,  exactly  the 
people  for  whom  the  state  drafted  vagrancy  and  poor  laws  as  well  as  press 
acts.  Stripped  of  the  moral  content  such  a  perspective  contains  an  element 
of  truth.  The  proletariat  thrust  up  by  primitive  accumulation,  the  people 
who  lived  by  the  sweat  of  their  labor  and  had  a  tenuous  grasp  on  subsistence, 
undoubtedly  counted  military  service  as  one  certain  form  of  employment. 
But  they  alone  could  never  satisfy  the  army's  demand  for  manpower  during 
wartime,  especially  on  the  scale  of  the  Seven  Years  War,  when  recruitment 
cut  deeply  into  the  British  populace.  At  the  same  time,  economic  change 
cut  adrift  craftsmen  as  well  as  common  laborers.  Periodic  downturns  and 
the  high  unemployment  and  prices  that  came  with  them  had  an  impact 
throughout  the  laboring  classes,  while  changes  in  the  nature  of  craft 
production  undermined  some  artisans'  ability  to  achieve  subsistence  and 
rendered  others  surplus  to  their  masters'  need.  Elsewhere  I  have  utilized 
data  garnered  from  the  Out-Pension  Books  of  the  Royal  Chelsea  Hospital 
to  explore  the  economic  background  of  Britain's  soldiers  in  the  Seven  Years 
War,  a  study  that  revealed  an  unexpectedly  skilled  background:  those  with 
trades  accounted  for  almost  half  the  men,  while  manual  laborers  made  for  in 
excess  of  40  per  cent.  Within  the  crafts  three  trades  predominated  -  textile 
workers,  shoemakers,  and  tailors  -  crafts  among  the  first  to  experience  the 
reorganization  of  production  attendant  upon  primitive  accumulation.15 

The  British  Army,  as  well  as  drawing  soldiers  from  the  wider  laboring 
classes,  also  cast  the  net  widely  in  recruiting  to  fill  the  ranks.  While  in 
reality  an  expression  of  English  might,  the  army  in  its  social  composition 
more  exactly  reflected  the  imperial  reach  of  that  might.  Fighting  on  the 
scale  that  William  Pitt  aspired  to  in  the  Seven  Years  War  required  an  army 
beyond  the  means  of  England  alone,  even  beyond  those  of  Great  Britain. 
England  looked  elsewhere  in  its  dominions  to  man  its  army,  to  domains 
already  compromised  by  English  imperialism,  Scotland  and  Ireland,  and 

15  Royal  Hospital,  Chelsea:  Disability  and  Royal  Artillery  Out-Pensions,  Admission  Books,  Series 
116,  War  Office  Papers,  PRO,  UK;  Way,  "Rebellion  of  the  Regulars";  Marx,  Capital,  pp.  784-848. 


298 


PETER  WAY 


beyond.  One  could  argue  that  the  British  Army  was  the  most  British  of 
institutions  by  the  mid-eighteenth  century.  Regimental  returns  for  the 
army  in  America  in  1757  reveal  an  ethnically  heterogeneous  rank  and  file. 
The  English-born  accounted  for  29.7  per  cent  of  the  whole,  Scots  27.3  per 
cent,  Irish  27.3  per  cent,  and  continental  Europeans  4.3  per  cent.  Colonials 
made  up  5.3  per  cent  of  the  army,  while  foreign-born  residents  of  America 
equaled  5.7  per  cent  (see  Table  10.1  and  Chart  10.1). 


Table  10.1  Nativity  of  NCOs  and  Private  Soldiers  in  America,  1757 


Foreign- 

Ameri- 

Foreign- 

ers 

can 

ers 

en- 

Coloni- 

enlisted 

listed  in 

English 

Scottish 

Irish 

als 

in  Europe 

America 

Total 

No.  % 

No.  % 

No.  % 

No.  % 

No.  % 

No.  % 

4212  29.8 

3873  27.4 

3874  27.4 

755  5.3 

607  4.3 

803  5.7 

14124 

Sources:  LO4011/no.  1/90;  L06695/99;  L02533/no.  4/90;  L02529/no.  1/90;  LO4012/no.  1/90;  L01944 
no.  5/90;  LO  6616/88;  L01683/no.  1/90;  L05661/85;  L01391/no.  1/90;  L01384/no.  2/90;  L03936/ 
no.  1/90;  L06639/89;  L01345/no.  5/90;  L06616/88;  LO4068/no.  2/90;  Return  of  Four  Independent 
Companies,  15  July  1757,  L06616/88.The  returns  represented  14,124 common  soldiersand 
noncommissioned  officers  of  the  army  in  America's  total  strength  of  approximately  20,000  men. 
See  Brumwell,  Redcoats,  p.  20. 

Chart  10.1 


□  English 
S  Scottish 
Z  Irish 

■  American  Colonials 


0  Foreigners  enlisted  in  Europe 

□  Foreigners  enlisted  in  America 

Given  the  relative  populations  of  these  elements  of  Greater  Britain,  it  is 
clear  that  Scotland  and  Ireland  disproportionately  manned  the  army. 


27,4% 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


299 


Working  from  population  estimates  for  the  respective  nations  (see  Table 
10.2),  each  soldier  born  in  England  or  Wales  (Welsh  soldiers  are  typically 
subsumed  with  the  English  in  army  returns)  who  served  in  the  regular 
army  in  America  in  1757  represented  1,599  inhabitants  of  their  homeland. 
By  comparison  every  Irish  soldier  served  for  824  fellow  Irish  people,  whereas 
a  Scottish  soldier  left  only  327  Scots  proportionately  at  home.  Thus,  an 
Irishman  was  roughly  twice  as  likely  and  a  Scottish  male  five  times  as 
likely  to  serve  in  the  American  army  than  an  Englishman  or  Welshman. 
Furthermore,  the  data  estimated  total  population,  male  and  female,  so  to 
arrive  at  a  true  approximate  service  ratio  we  need  to  halve  those  figures, 
meaning  that  English  and  Welsh  men  had  a  likelihood  of  1  in  800  of  serving 
in  the  American  army,  Irish  1  in  422,  and  Scots  1  in  164.  Moreover,  the  ratio 
for  Scots  overstates  the  case,  as  the  majority  of  recruits  were  drawn  from 
the  Highlands,  which  was  less  populous  than  the  Lowlands.  Finally,  these 
calculations  do  not  take  into  account  those  soldiers  serving  within  Great 
Britain,  on  the  European  continent,  in  the  West  Indies,  or  elsewhere  in  the 
British  Empire.  Clearly  the  male  populations  of  Ireland  and  Scotland  had 
been  harnessed  to  the  British  war  machine,  disproportionate  contributions 
that  resulted  from  specific  historical  developments.  Mobilization  thus  took 
place  in  distinct  settings,  operating  differently  in  and  having  a  differential 
impact  on  each  locale.  A  review  of  the  main  theatres  of  mobilization  makes 
this  clear,  but  also  reveals  a  central  thread  in  the  process:  the  interconnect- 
edness  of  the  raising  of  armies  and  economic  transformations  associated 
with  the  emergence  of  capitalism  taking  place  within  these  societies. 


Table  10.2  Population  ratios  by  nativity  for  British  NCOs  and  private  soldiers  in 
America,  1757 


Population* 

Year 

No.  of 
Soldiers 

Ratio  to 
population 

England  and 

Wales 

6,736,000 

1760/1 

4,212 

1:1,599 

Scotland 

1,265,000 

1755 

3,873 

1:327 

Ireland 

3,191,000 

1754 

3,874 

1:824 

*Source:  Mitchell,  British  Historical  Statistics,  p.  8. 


The  fact  that  soldiers  came  from  all  ranks  of  laboring  classes  and  across  the 
empire  means  that  any  engagement  with  the  military  as  a  socioeconomic 
institution  must  make  allowance  for  the  contingencies  of  different  histori- 


300 


PETER  WAY 


cal  class  experiences.  At  the  same  time,  the  commercialization  of  human 
relationships  strikes  a  recurring  theme  in  these  different  histories.  Such 
change  weakened  or  severed  peoples'  grasp  on  subsistence  attained  by 
working  the  land  or  plying  a  trade,  as  a  result  preparing  them  for  wage  labor 
including  that  in  the  army. 

England,  military  metropole 

Linda  Colley  maintained  that  the  series  of  wars  between  Britain  and  France 
from  1689  to  1815  constructed  Britishness,  a  sense  of  difference  from  those 
people  outside  Great  Britain,  largely  founded  upon  Protestantism  and  forged 
in  warfare,  which  connected  its  different  parts  together.'6  Colley's  model  has 
been  criticized  for  its  exaggeration  of  the  integrating  powers  of  Protestant- 
ism, her  timing  of  the  real  unification  of  national  interests  within  Great 
Britain,  and,  most  tellingly,  its  Anglocentrism.  In  many  ways,  Britain  should 
be  understood  as  England  writ  large.  England  constituted  the  heart  of  the 
British  dominions.  England's  Parliament  controlled  Wales  and  Scotland 
from  1707,  and  retained  final  authority  over  the  Irish  Parliament.  The  fiscal- 
military  state  operated  essentially  in  the  interest  of  England  in  harvesting 
taxes  and  duties  from  across  its  possessions,  and  developing  military  policy 
with  the  defense  of  England  as  its  main  priority.  English  diplomats  crafted 
foreign  policy  to  ensure  the  established  Protestant  religion,  promoted 
trade  that  primarily  benefited  England,  and  protected  the  interests  of  the 
Hanoverian  regime.  And,  when  diplomacy  failed,  England's  politicians  set 
the  country  on  a  war  footing,  dragging  Wales,  Scotland,  Ireland,  and  its 
other  dependencies  along  too.  Fighting  wars,  however,  constituted  one  area 
where  the  English  willingly  shared  the  effort  and  the  results. 

The  opening  of  hostilities  with  the  French  in  the  Seven  Years  War  and 
the  rapid  escalation  in  the  scale  of  mobilization  sent  recruiting  parties  out 
across  England  in  a  quest  to  satisfy  the  need  for  military  manpower.  The 
press  played  a  role  but  voluntarism  proved  essential  to  the  war  effort.  Why 
men  willingly  enlist  to  fight  in  wars  is  a  question  that  has  long  intrigued 
military  historians.  Patriotism  immediately  suggests  itself,  and  one  should 
not  underestimate  its  power  in  an  era  that  witnessed  the  emergence  of 
strong  nationalist  and  imperialist  currents  in  British  culture.17  Just  as  often, 
historians  note  that  recruits  joined  up  for  adventure,  or  in  flight  from 

16  Colley,  Britons,  pp.  3-6,  9, 11-19,  38-46, 55"57- 

17  Wilson,  "Empire  ofVirtue". 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


301 


boring  laboring  life,  overbearing  parents,  a  demanding  master,  a  clinging 
love  interest,  or  the  law.  The  fact  that  most  recruits  were  youths  in  their 
late  teens  to  early  twenties  supports  the  wanderlust  explanation.  As  well, 
economic  necessity  prompted  enlistment,  according  to  historians  of  early 
modern  armies.  At  times  of  poor  harvests  and  high  prices,  unemployed  or 
underemployed  individuals  without  the  means  to  support  themselves  opted 
for  the  wage,  food,  and  clothing  of  the  soldier.18 

But  one  must  be  wary  of  perceiving  a  whiplash  effect  between  immediate 
short-term  economic  depression  and  military  enlistment.  Recruitment 
cannot  be  measured  by  a  price  index.  Long-term  economic  forces  played 
the  primary  role,  restructuring  economies  in  ways  that  increased  produc- 
tivity and  created  a  labor  surplus  that  both  helped  to  pay  for  wars  and 
produced  the  manpower  necessary  to  do  the  fighting.  And  the  English 
agrarian  economy  proved  so  productive  that  it  required  fewer  people  to 
work  the  land,  thus  freeing  others  to  work  in  industry,  or  indeed  the  army.19 
As  the  leading  commercial  nation  of  Europe,  England  led  the  way  in  the 
capitalist  reconfiguration  of  society.  Agricultural  improvement,  including 
the  enclosure  and  conversion  of  common  lands  to  market  production,  the  re- 
organization of  production  within  certain  trades,  and  the  resultant  creation 
of  a  landless,  tradeless  proletariat  provided  the  army  with  a  ready  supply 
of  recruits,  willing  or  not.  Moreover,  England  suffered  economic  depres- 
sion and  incidents  of  famine  beginning  in  1756,  leading  to  unemployment, 
strikes,  bread  riots,  and  general  discontent  at  exactly  the  time  recruitment 
ramped  up  for  the  Seven  Years  War.20  James  Wolfe,  sent  with  troops  to 
quell  disturbances  among  Gloucester  weavers  late  in  1756,  expressed  some 
sympathy  with  their  situation  in  letters  to  his  mother.  "The  obstinacy  of  the 
poor,  half-starved  weavers  of  broad-cloth  that  inhabit  this  extraordinary 
country  is  surprising.  They  beg  about  the  country  for  food,  because,  they  say, 
the  masters  have  beat  down  their  wages  too  low  to  live  upon,  and  I  believe 
it  is  a  just  complaint."  At  the  same  time,  he  recognized  their  desperation 
could  prove  a  bonus  for  the  army.  "I  hope  it  will  turn  out  a  good  recruiting 
party,  for  the  people  are  so  oppressed,  so  poor  and  so  wretched,  that  they 


18  Anderson,  War  and  Society  in  the  Old  Regime,  pp.  46, 121-123;  Steppler,  "The  Common  Soldier 
in  the  Reign  of  George  III",  pp.  32-35;  Guy,  "The  Army  of  the  Georges",  p.  95. 

19  Wrigley,  "Society  and  the  Economy  in  the  Eighteenth  Century",  pp.  72-73,  76-81,  89-91. 

20  Rule,  The  Vital  Century,  pp.  102-104,  no,  147-148,  The  Labouring  Classes  in  Early  Industrial 
England,  pp.  256-259;  Malcolmson,  Life  and  Labour  in  England,  pp.  113, 125;  Hayter,  The  Army 
and  the  Crowd,  pp.  84-87;  Brewer,  The  Sinews  of  Power,  pp.  52-53. 


302 


PETER  WAY 


will  perhaps  hazard  a  knock  on  the  pate  for  bread  and  clothes,  and  turn 
soldiers  through  sheer  necessity."21 

Stay  and  starve  in  England  only  to  get  a  knock  on  the  head  for  protesting 
your  condition,  or  join  the  army;  many  faced  this  conundrum  in  the  Seven 
Years  War.  Merchant  capital  required  armed  forces  to  secure  and  defend 
its  interests,  and  the  changes  initiated  by  capital  accumulation  -  both  in 
the  long-term  structural  changes  that  freed  labor  power  and  in  the  short- 
term  economic  crises  that  undercut  subsistence  -  generated  capital's  own 
martial  labor  force.  The  fact  that  Britain  rose  to  the  status  of  most  advanced 
economic  power  and  the  dominant  military  power  in  the  mid-eighteenth 
century  derived  from  no  mere  coincidence.  This  story,  so  familiar  from  read- 
ing Marx  and  the  great  British  Marxist  historians,22  proves  more  complex, 
for  remember  that  only  three  in  ten  soldiers  in  the  British  Army  in  America 
came  from  England.  Viewing  the  British  army  as  simply  the  product  of 
internal  English  economic  developments  obscures  the  heterogeneity  of  the 
very  institution,  and  the  multiple  sources  of  manpower  it  tapped  to  wage 
war,  each  a  product  of  particular  historical  forces. 

Scotland,  the  military  plantation 

"I  am  for  always  having  in  our  army  as  many  Scottish  soldiers  as  possible", 
William  Wildman,  Lord  Barrington,  the  member  of  Parliament  for  the 
border  town  Berwick-upon-Tweed,  avowed  to  the  House  of  Commons  in  1751, 
"not  that  I  think  them  more  brave  than  those  of  any  other  country  we  can 
recruit  from,  but  because  they  are  generally  more  hardy  and  less  mutinous; 
and  of  all  Scottish  soldiers  I  should  choose  to  have  and  keep  in  our  army 
as  many  Highlanders  as  possible."  Whereas  Colley  reads  this  comment  as 
a  measure  of  Scotland's  successful  integration  into  Great  Britain,  Andrew 
Mackillop  believes  Barrington's  views  reflected  Britain's  "cannon-fodder 
policy",  whereby  in  the  aftermath  of  the  failed  Jacobite  uprising  of  1745-1746, 
Britain  harnessed  Gaelic  militarism  to  its  overseas  imperial  interests,  but 
not  until  the  Seven  Years  War  did  Britain's  policy  of  stripping  the  Highlands 
to  wage  its  wars  become  fully  realized.23 

21  Wolfe  to  his  mother,  n.d.  Nov.  1756,  Wolfe  to  his  mother,  24  Oct.  1756,  in  Willson,  The  Life 
and  Letters  of  James  Wolfe,  pp.  304-306. 

22  Here,  I  will  only  mention  E.  P.  Thompson  and  the  "bible"  of  labor  history,  The  Making  of  the 
English  Working  Class. 

23  Barrington  cited  in  Colley,  Britons,  p.  125;  Mackillop,  "More  Fruitful  than  the  Soil",  p.  58. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


303 


The  fact  that  English  military  policy  had  a  direct  impact  on  the  govern- 
ance of  Scotland  in  general  and  the  Highlands  in  particular  derived  from 
the  Act  of  Union  and  the  abolition  of  the  Scottish  Parliament.  The  British 
Army  played  a  central  role  in  the  Highlands,  forming  six  independent 
Highland  companies  in  1725  to  police  the  region  and  build  roads  to  make 
the  "savage"  Highlands  more  accessible  to  British  rule  and  commerce.  In 
1739,  it  formed  four  further  companies,  and  the  ten  companies  combined  to 
form  the  Black  Watch,  the  first  regiment  of  Highland  troops  incorporated 
within  the  regular  army.  In  1745,  John  Campbell,  4th  Earl  of  Loudoun 
(commander-in-chief  in  America,  1756-1758),  formed  a  second  regiment.24 
In  the  short  term,  British  Army  recruitment  in  the  Highlands  remained 
inseparable  from  the  repression  of  the  Jacobite  threat,  finally  laid  to  rest  on 
Culloden  field  in  1746.  The  army  then  raided  the  territories  of  rebels,  taking 
prisoners,  disarming  suspected  rebels,  laying  waste  crops,  and  confiscating 
livestock.  Trials  were  held  and  more  than  100  captives  executed  for  treason, 
and  many  more  were  transported  to  the  colonies  as  indentured  servants  or 
to  serve  as  troops  in  regiments  stationed  abroad.  The  British  government 
adopted  a  number  of  legislative  measures  intended  to  subordinate  the 
Highlands,  confiscating  rebel  lands,  disarming  the  populace,  banning  the 
wearing  of  tartans,  regulating  the  practice  of  religion,  and  reforming  the 
legal  system.  The  army  played  a  central  role  in  reclamation  of  the  Highlands, 
becoming  the  British  state's  most  powerful  expression  in  this  region  tainted 
by  rebellion.25  The  threat  of  Jacobitism  had  directed  government  policy 
into  a  military  sphere,  and  ensured  the  persistence  of  a  cultural  form,  clan- 
ship, that  it  was  meant  to  eradicate.  In  the  process,  England  ghettoized  the 
Highlands  as  "an  imperial-military  reservoir".26 

Britain  then  set  about  reorganizing  the  region's  economy  on  the  pattern 
of  commercial  agricultural  production  developing  in  England,  establishing 
the  Board  of  Annexed  Estates  to  manage  the  thirteen  estates  annexed  to 
the  crown  (other  confiscated  properties  were  auctioned  off  to  pay  debts).  It 
also  shouldered  the  task  of  "improving"  the  Highland  agricultural  economy 
by  converting  clan  patterns  of  land  management  to  a  more  commercial 


24  Plank,  Rebellion  and  Savagery,  pp.  18-21;  Mackillop,  "More  Fruitful  than  the  Soil",  pp.  13-20, 
22, 29. 

25  Youngson,  After  the  Forty-Five,  pp.  25-26;  Houlding,  Fit  for  Service,  p.  13;  Plank,  Rebellion  and 
Savagery,  pp.  1-3, 6. 

26  Mackillop,  "More  Fruitful  than  the  Soil",  pp.  39-40.  Scots  also  had  a  history  of  service  in 
continental  armies,  particularly  that  of  France.  See  McCorry,  "Rats,  Lice  and  Scotchmen". 


304 


PETER  WAY 


basis.27  It  soon  developed  a  program  that  set  about  shortening  leases,  pro- 
moting single-tenant  farms  of  sufficient  size  to  produce  market  surpluses, 
establishing  security  of  tenure,  removing  surplus  farm  labor,  restricting 
subtenure  and  evicting  unwanted  tenantry,  better  managing  husbandry, 
and  developing  new  villages.  These  acts  led  to  large-scale  eviction  in 
some  areas  and  sparked  fears  of  depopulation.  In  1760,  the  commissioners 
proposed  "the  propagation  of  a  hardy  and  industrious  race,  fit  for  serving 
the  public  in  war".28  This  position  merely  recognized  an  ongoing  process 
by  which  military  service  absorbed  much  of  the  surplus  labor  generated  by 
changes  to  the  Highland  economy. 

With  the  outbreak  of  hostilities  with  France,  concern  over  the  use  of 
Highland  troops  dissipated,  and  William  Pitt,  who  took  power  in  November 
1756,  decided  to  raise  two  new  battalions  of  Highland  troops  from  clans 
that  had  followed  the  Stuarts.  Fortuitously,  just  as  economic  depression 
in  England  had  facilitated  mobilization,  so  did  famine  in  Scotland  in  1757. 
Another  Highland  battalion  formed  in  1758,  two  more  in  1759,  and  by 
war's  end  ten  new  battalions  of  Highlanders  had  been  raised,  making  the 
Highlands  much  more  militarized  than  the  Lowlands.29  The  Press  Act  also 
dragooned  Highlanders  into  the  army.  In  April  1756,  with  the  act  about  to 
go  into  effect,  the  commissioners  of  supply  and  justices  of  the  peace  in  the 
County  of  Inverness  decided  to  canvas  the  gentlemen  of  the  various  districts 
to  identify  men  to  draw  up  a  list  of  "fitt  and  proper"  men  to  press  into  the 
North  American  service.  A  return  of  troops  in  the  42nd  Regiment  present 
at  Schenectady,  New  York,  the  next  year  indicates  that  Highland  justices 
had  in  some  instances  to  resort  to  the  last  method,  as  thirty-five  men  were 
recorded  as  serving  the  six-year  term  of  pressed  men.30 

To  understand  Scottish  recruiting,  however,  it  must  be  situated  in  its 
socioeconomic  environment.  The  country's  population  was  essentially 
stagnant,  growing  at  just  0.6  per  cent  in  1750-1800  (half  of  England's  rate), 
meaning  that  recruitment  constituted  a  net  loss  demographically.31  At  the 

27  See  Plank,  Rebellion  and  Savagery,  p.  12;  Youngson,  After  the  Forty-Five,  pp.  26-27;  Machines, 
"Scottish  Gaeldom",  p.  71. 

28  Mackillop,  "More  Fruitful  than  the  Soil",  pp.  77-83;  quotation  from  Hints  Towards  a  Plan  for 
Managing  the  Forfeited  Estates,  cited  on  pp.  89-90. 

29  Middleton,  "The  Recruitment  of  the  British  Army",  pp.  226-231,  234,  237;  Mackillop,  "More 
Fruitful  than  the  Soil",  pp.  46-50,  229;  Middleton,  "A  Reinforcement  for  North  America". 

30  Commissioners  of  Supply  and  Justices  of  the  Peace,  Extract  minutes,  5,  6  April  1756, 
LO1017/22;  Francis  Grant,  List  of  the  men  of  the  42nd  Regiment  who  have  Inlisted  for  a  Term  of 
Years  according  to  the  Press  Act,  16  April  1757,  LO4214/74. 

31  Houston,  "The  Demographic  Regime",  pp.  12-13,  20-21. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


305 


time  of  recruitment  for  the  Seven  Years  War,  Scotland  as  a  whole  possessed 
a  three-tiered  rural  social  structure  of  landlords,  tenants,  and  landless 
laborers.  Land  constituted  the  key  to  subsistence  in  what  was  still  es- 
sentially a  peasant  society  with  greater  similarities  to  mainland  Europe 
than  to  England.32  In  the  rural  Lowlands,  the  social  structure  rested  on 
ferm-touns,  which  ranged  from  small  units  of  twenty  families  or  fewer  to 
some  the  size  of  villages.  Usually  tenants  rented  the  lands  in  the  touns  by 
leasehold  from  an  absent  landlord,  with  a  smattering  of  owner-occupiers 
evident  in  some  areas.  A  toun  could  be  held  by  one  tenant  or  by  several  with 
holdings  of  varying  sizes,  larger  in  the  south-east,  whereas  in  the  north-east 
smallholdings  proved  more  common.  Cottars  (families  that  held  small  plots 
of  land  by  subtenure)  mostly  worked  the  land,  owing  duties  to  the  tenant  or 
landowner.  Servants  engaged  for  six  months  to  a  year  in  full-time  service, 
who  often  came  from  cottar  families  and  could  eventually  set  themselves 
up  as  such,  also  performed  agricultural  labor.  Changes  in  the  eighteenth 
century  favored  tenants  and  owner-occupiers,  with  their  hold  on  the  land 
being  restrained  only  by  terms  of  lease,  and  ordinary  people's  access  to  the 
land  became  limited.  The  number  of  touns  held  by  a  single  tenant  grew  in 
number.  They  consolidated  their  holdings  and  enclosed  lands  to  convert 
to  pasture  for  their  sole  use.  This  erosion  of  common  rights  deprived  cot- 
tars and  subtenants  of  land,  converting  them  to  employees  of  landlords  or 
tenants.  Still  smallholdings  persisted  everywhere,  and  in  some  areas  so  did 
the  old  heterogeneous  holding,  common  rights  pattern.  In  the  northeast 
counties  of  Banff,  Kincardine,  and  Aberdeen,  the  rise  of  crofting  meant  that 
people  farmed  small  strips  of  land  but  also  worked  part-time  for  farmers 
through  economic  need.  Crofters  came  to  replace  cottars.33 

The  dwindling  availability  of  land  meant  people  often  combined  farming  of 
smallholdings  with  wages  earned  from  labor  on  farms,  as  craftsmen,  or  in  the 
building  trade.  Rural  underemployment  became  common  especially  outside 
the  peak  farm  work  seasons,  and  this  pushed  people  into  paid  employment, 
bringing  them  into  competition  with  tradespeople,  especially  in  cloth  manu- 
facture. Weavers  often  experienced  slack  periods  and  had  to  find  employment 
elsewhere.  Outside  towns  little  full-time  manufacturing  work  existed,  except 
in  the  mining  and  salt  industries.  The  linen  industry,  which  doubled  produc- 
tion about  every  twenty  to  twenty-five  years  between  1730  and  1800,  depended 
on  finding  cheap,  exploitable  labor,  and  developed  a  putting-out  model  of 
production  whereby  the  raw  materials  were  sent  out  to  rural  workers  for 

32  Devine,  "Introduction",  p.  2. 

33  Gray,  "The  Social  Impact  of  Agrarian  Change  in  the  Rural  Lowlands",  pp.  53-61. 


306 


PETER  WAY 


spinning.  In  the  1730S-1740S,  spinning  increasingly  encroached  on  the  north 
and  the  Highlands.  The  craft  career  path  broke  down  and  journeymen  became 
lifelong  wageworkers.  Journeymen's  societies  emerge  by  the  early  eighteenth 
century  and,  later,  permanent  organizations  arose  among  such  trades  as  tailors 
and  shoemakers.  Rising  prices  caused  the  most  disputes,  leading  to  calls  for 
higher  wages,  but  typically  the  state  backed  the  capitalist.34 

In  the  Highlands  the  bale  or  clachan,  the  traditional  township  and  basis 
of  settlement  and  management,  functioned  essentially  as  a  communalis- 
tic,  multi-tenanted  farm  managed  by  tacksmen,  who  leased  lands  from 
clan  leaders  and  sub-leased  portions  to  clan  members.  From  the  1730s, 
landowners,  who  viewed  traditional  clan  practices  as  an  impediment  to 
improvement,  began  eliminating  the  bale  along  with  tacksmen  in  the  move 
to  single-tenant  farms  and  crofting  communities  of  individual  smallhold- 
ings and  common  pasture.  The  defeat  at  Culloden  freed  clan  leaders  to 
pursue  progress  and  break  down  the  communalistic  ethos  of  the  clans, 
in  the  process  subordinating  Scottish  Gaeldom  to  the  market  and  British 
imperialism.35  Military  recruitment  played  an  important  role  in  the  process. 
For  the  Highland  elite,  recruiting  regiments  constituted  the  main  means 
of  "colonizing"  the  resources  of  the  British  fiscal-military  state.  Recruiting 
targeted  those  on  the  margins  of  the  Highland  economy,  not  established 
tenants  or  proven  rent-payers.  Faced  with  rising  recruitment  bounties, 
landlords  sought  to  transfer  the  costs  of  recruiting  to  their  main  tenants  by 
asking  them  to  fill  quotas  or  pay  for  substitutes.  These  men  resisted  because 
recruitment  drained  the  very  manpower  they  required  to  commercialize 
their  holdings,  drove  up  wages,  and  made  them  maintain  subtenants  and 
cottars  on  the  land  to  satisfy  landlord  levies  rather  than  to  evict  them 
and  improve  the  land.36  Also,  the  need  for  recruits  meant  that  those  at 
the  bottom  of  Highland  society  wielded  some  control  over  the  terms  of 
enlistment.  Landlords  faced  with  scarcity  felt  compelled  to  offer  favorable 
terms  to  recruits.  Enlistment  bounties  exceeded  the  amount  allowed  by 
the  government  in  the  late  1750s.  Those  without  sufficient  liquid  capital 
had  to  grant  land  in  place  of  monetary  bounties,  either  securing  existing 
landholdings  or  promising  grants  of  new  land  upon  returning  home  from 
service.  In  return  for  providing  military  recruits,  subtenants  demanded  to 

34  Whatley,  "The  Experience  of  Work",  pp.  228-230, 233-234;  Fraser,  "Patterns  of  Protest",  p.  278. 

35  Dodgshon,  "West  Highland  and  Hebridean  Settlement  Prior  to  Crofting  and  the  Clearances"; 
Macinnes,  "Scottish  Gaeldom",  pp.  70-72, 75-76. 

36  Mackillop,  "More  Fruitful  than  the  Soil",  pp.  84-88,  101, 103, 107-109, 132-133, 139-140, 144, 
155-156, 169-173- 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


307 


hold  land  directly  from  the  landlord,  and  thus  circumvented  tacksmen.  Thus 
recruitment,  in  part  a  matter  of  landlord  coercion,  also  proved  a  means  of 
social  advancement  for  the  subtenantry.37  Recruiting  raised  the  expecta- 
tions of  landless  and  subtenant  groups,  and  these  were  met  by  subdivision 
of  the  land.  Mackillop  concludes  that  "one  of  recruitment's  most  important 
social  effects  lay  in  the  fact  that  it  undermined  the  hierarchical  structure 
of  Highland  farms  and  expedited  the  emergence  of  crofting".38  Good  in 
the  short  term  in  that  it  expanded  access  to  land  by  the  lowest  ranks  of 
highland  society,  in  the  long  term,  however,  it  led  directly  to  the  Highland 
Clearances  in  the  postwar  era. 

The  Jacobite  revolt  of  1745-1746  provided  the  British  fiscal-military  state 
the  wedge  with  which  to  pry  open  the  Highlands  for  economic  improvement. 
Military  recruitment  played  a  key  role  in  that  improvement,  skimming  off 
former  rebels  and  the  common  people  uprooted  by  the  commercialization 
of  the  Highland  economy.  While  lairds  and  recruits  alike  exploited  the 
capital  generated  by  the  military  leviathan,  in  the  end  the  army's  needs 
transformed  the  region  and  the  clearances  followed  in  its  train.  At  the  same 
time,  Scots  came  to  play  a  central  role  in  the  British  Army  and  Highlanders 
crafted  a  unique  military  persona,  with  the  tartan  becoming  as  much  a 
symbol  of  British  militarism  as  the  red  coat.39 

Ireland,  island  garrison 

Ireland's  relation  to  the  fiscal-military  state  differed  from  that  of  Scotland  in 
that  it  did  not  serve  primarily  as  a  military  plantation  that  produced  troops 
for  Britain's  overseas  military  enterprise.  The  army  officially  did  not  recruit 
Irish  Catholics  and  only  enlisted  Irish  Protestants  during  wartime,  although 
significant  numbers  of  Irish  did  enter  the  army.  The  island  functioned  first 
and  foremost  as  a  military  depot  and  source  of  funds  to  support  British 
militarism.  By  stationing  12,000  soldiers  there  in  times  of  peace,  amounting 
to  more  than  one-third  of  the  peacetime  army,  England  could  maintain 
a  large  force  without  immediately  threatening  the  homeland  but  easily 
within  reach  in  times  of  need.40  Moreover,  by  placing  these  regiments  on 

37  Ibid.,  pp.  84-88, 107-108, 157-160. 

38  Ibid.,  pp.  129, 162-163, 166. 

39  Allan  Macinnes  estimates  the  army  recruited  48,000  men  from  the  Highlands  from  the 
beginning  of  the  Seven  Years'  War  to  the  end  of  the  Napoleonic  Wars:  "Scottish  Gaeldom",  p.  83. 

40  Houlding,  Fit  for  Service,  p.  45. 


308 


PETER  WAY 


the  Irish  establishment  paid  for  by  taxation  set  by  Ireland's  Parliament, 
Britain  colonized  its  resources  and  expropriated  its  wealth.  Finally  given 
the  troubled  history  between  the  English  and  Irish,  garrisoning  12,000 
troops  on  the  island  made  them  a  de facto  occupying  force,  suppressing  Irish 
Catholics,  and  elevating  Irish  Protestants,  but  keeping  both  subordinate  to 
Britain.  Ireland's  unique  role  resulted  from  its  particular  history  of  coloniza- 
tion by,  rebellion  against,  and  religious  strife  with  England. 

England  viewed  Ireland,  unlike  Scotland  or  Wales,  as  a  colony.  More  so  than 
other  British  colonies,  however,  its  history  involved  successive  invasions  and 
military  conquest.  First  came  the  wave  of  Anglo-Norman  invaders,  followed 
by  "New  English"  colonizers  of  Ireland  in  the  period  1560-1660.  The  rebellion 
of  1641  led  to  the  Cromwellian  reconquest  and  the  imposition  of  a  Protestant 
ascendancy.  The  English  Revolution  and  the  defeat  of  James  II  and  VII  by 
William  of  Orange's  Protestant  armies  handed  control  of  provincial  power 
and  land  to  the  Anglo-Irish  ratified  in  the  Treaty  of  Limerick  of  1692,  and 
there  soon  followed  a  series  of  penal  laws  restricting  the  political,  economic, 
and  social  rights  of  Catholics.41  Unlike  Scotland,  however,  Ireland  retained 
its  parliament,  although  first  Catholics  and  then  Presbyterians  would  lose 
the  franchise,  making  it  an  expression  of  Anglo-Irish  will.  This  became  the 
body  nominally  overseeing  the  Irish  establishment  of  the  British  Army. 

The  English  Disbanding  Act  of  1699  set  the  Irish  establishment  at  12,000, 
where  it  remained  until  1769  (although  at  given  times  a  number  of  regiments 
could  be  on  duty  elsewhere  in  the  empire).  During  peacetime,  desertion, 
death,  and  the  old  and  infirm  serving  in  the  ranks  vitiated  its  nominal 
strength,  reducing  the  number  of  effective  soldiers  by  as  much  as  a  quarter. 
Conversely,  during  wartime,  the  establishment  expanded,  for  example, 
reaching  17,000  for  a  period  in  1756-1757  and  24,000  from  1761  to  the  peace 
in  1763. 42  As  it  had  before  the  Treaty  of  Limerick,  the  Irish  Parliament 
dominated  by  the  Anglo-Irish  paid  for  the  army  from  its  revenues,  yet  had 
no  control  over  the  number  of  troops  or  the  expense,  as  a  royal  proclamation 
applied  the  act  to  Ireland.  Here  nakedly  appears  Ireland's  colonial  status 
in  military  matters.  The  Lord  Lieutenant,  the  king's  civil  representative  in 
Ireland,  also  acted  as  a  military  governor,  but  exerted  limited  control  over 
this  force.  The  regiments  remained  subject  to  the  British  Mutiny  Act,  and 
their  primary  functions  entailed  the  defense  of  England  and  the  provision 

41  James,  Ireland  in  the  Empire  7688-7770,  pp.  22-25, 52. 234-236, 289-291;  Linebaugh  and  Rediker, 
The  Many-Headed  Hydra,  p.  57;  Canny,  "Identity  Formation  in  Ireland",  pp.  159-160;  Pittock, 
Inventing  and  Resisting  Britain,  p.  49;  Connolly,  Divided  Kingdom,  pp.  197-203. 

42  Houlding,  Fit  for  Service,  p.  24. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


309 


of  reserve  military  forces  for  deployment  elsewhere  at  the  expense  of  the 
Irish.  Only  in  the  1740s  did  Britain  place  regiments  sent  abroad  from  Ireland 
on  the  English  establishment  and  assume  their  expense.  The  Anglo-Irish 
derived  patronage  opportunities  from  it,  such  as  the  awarding  of  commis- 
sions and  contracts  for  supplies.  Unlike  the  Scottish  example,  though,  the 
Anglo-Irish  did  not  directly  tap  the  resources  of  the  British  fiscal-military 
state,  instead  colonizing  the  Irish  in  general  through  additional  taxes.43 
The  British  government  profited  substantially,  but  from  the  perspective 
of  many  Irish,  however,  the  army  must  have  seemed  like  a  giant  parasite. 

The  "Irish"  army  was  Irish  in  name  only.  In  1701,  Britain  proscribed  Catho- 
lics from  serving  in  the  army.  Catholics  did  join  the  army  unofficially,  but 
they  had  to  abjure  their  faith  when  enlisting.44  Many  Irish  Catholics,  in  fact, 
demonstrated  their  true  allegiance  by  enlisting  with  Britain's  enemies.45 
Britain  also  normally  rejected  Irish  Protestants  from  army  service:  first 
to  ensure  Catholics  did  not  enter  the  army  by  claiming  to  be  Protestant; 
and,  secondly,  as  Presbyterians  comprised  two-thirds  of  Irish  Protestants, 
to  keep  out  suspected  dissenters.  During  wartime,  however,  manpower 
needs  overrode  these  concerns  and  the  army  recruited  Irish  Protestants.46 
The  Irish  army,  then,  amounted  to  a  force  of  12,000  English  and  Scottish 
troops  garrisoned  in  Ireland  and  paid  for  by  the  Irish  through  taxation  set 
by  the  Irish  Parliament,  which  exerted  minimal  control  over  the  army.  Some 
historians  have  argued  that  the  combination  of  penal  laws  and  a  standing 
army  did  not  make  Ireland  a  police  state,47  but  the  presence  of  this  many 
soldiers  makes  it  hard  not  to  view  the  army  as  an  occupying  force. 

Ireland's  economy  in  the  eighteenth  century  experienced  similar 
changes  to  those  in  Scotland  and  England,  with  the  expansion  of  com- 
mercial agriculture,  the  development  of  new  manufacturing  activities, 
and  the  reorganization  of  traditional  forms  of  craft  production  producing 
surplus  labor  that  elsewhere  armies  would  partially  absorb.  Yet  political  and 
religious  reasons  prohibited  paid  military  labor  as  an  option  for  many  set 

43  Guy,  "The  Irish  Military  Establishment",  pp.  212-214, 216-217;  Childs,  "The  Restoration  of  the 
Army",  p.  51;  Connolly,  Divided  Kingdom,  pp.  322-323;  Mackillop,  "More  Fruitful  than  the  Soil", 
pp.  23-24;  James,  Ireland  in  the  Empire,  pp.  174-178, 181-182,  210-211. 

44  James,  Ireland  in  the  Empire,  pp.  264-265;  Guy,  "The  Irish  Military  Establishment",  pp.  217, 229. 

45  Pittock,  Inventing  and  Resisting  Britain,  pp.  49-50;  Murtagh,  "Irish  Soldiers  Abroad";  Con- 
nolly, Divided  Kingdom,  pp.  89-90,  286-290,  375-376. 

46  Guy,  "The  Irish  Military  Establishment",  pp.  2vj-2ig;]ames,  Ireland  in  the  Empire,  pp.  178-180; 
Mackillop,  "More  Fruitful  than  the  Soil",  pp.  23-24;  Houlding,  Fit  for  Service,  p.  46. 

47  James,  Ireland  in  the  Empire,  pp.  289-291;  Guy,  "The  Irish  Military  Establishment",  p.  219; 
Houlding,  Fit  for  Service,  pp.  46-47. 


310 


PETER  WAY 


free  from  the  soil  and  trades.  A  quick  look  at  Irish  economic  development 
identifies  the  factors  that  lay  behind  enlistment  when  war  opened  the  door 
to  military  service  for  many  A  landed  aristocracy  urban  and  rural  middle 
classes,  and  lower  classes  of  peasants  and  laborers  comprised  the  Irish  social 
structure.  By  1700,  most  landlords  came  from  the  Anglican  Anglo-Irish,  as 
the  penal  laws  restricted  Catholics  landholding  in  a  number  of  ways,  while 
the  middle  class  was  more  heterogeneous.48  Catholics  formed  the  majority 
of  the  lower  classes,  particularly  those  that  tilled  the  soil,  and  dominated 
the  countryside.  Peasant  society  had  been  organized  communally  into  a 
clachan,  a  pattern  similar  to  that  in  Scotland.  A  group  of  families  leased 
the  land  collectively  with  each  getting  equal  access  to  land  for  tillage  and 
pasture  in  a  system  called  rundale.  From  the  seventeenth  century,  this 
arrangement  came  under  increasing  pressure  from  ongoing  broad  shifts 
in  land  management  wrought  by  those  who  wished  to  farm  the  land  for 
commercial  purposes,  most  notably  by  enclosing  tilled  land  for  pasturage 
of  sheep  and  later  livestock.  The  commercial  pressures  began  the  breakup 
of  the  peasantry.  Some  proved  able  to  transform  into  small  tenants  with 
enough  land  and  livestock  to  farm  on  their  own  and  pay  cash  rent.  The 
majority  became  laborers,  most  of  whom  held  only  small  pieces  of  land  they 
rented  with  labor,  while  the  rest  sold  their  labor  to  pay  cash  rent  for  small 
plots  in  the  conacre  system.  "In  both  cases,  however",  according  to  Sean 
Connolly,  "their  true  position  was  of  a  rural  proletariat  exchanging  their 
labour  for  the  means  of  subsistence."49  The  relationship  between  landlord 
and  tenant  also  altered  as  a  result  of  the  commercialization  of  land  use. 
Landowners  tended  to  lease  their  lands  in  blocks  to  middlemen  who  then 
rented  the  lands  to  peasants  for  a  profit,  often  squeezing  too  much  out 
of  those  who  worked  the  land,  rendering  them  vulnerable  to  even  minor 
problems  affecting  the  Irish  economy.50 

Ireland  experienced  repeated  crises  of  subsistence  with  famines  occur- 
ring in  1720-1721  and  1728-1729,  but  most  devastatingly  in  1740-1741,  which 
caused  mortality  comparable  to  the  Great  Famine  of  the  1840s.  The  harvest 
failure  of  1756-1757  must  also  have  played  a  role  in  the  recruitment  of  the 
army.51  Commentators  at  the  time  have  pointed  to  the  shift  from  tillage 

48  James,  Ireland  in  the  Empire,  pp.  219-225. 

49  Connolly,  Divided  Kingdom,  pp.  349,  350,  358,  359,  361-362  ("rural  proletariat"),  358-359; 
Miller,  Emigrants  and  Exiles,  pp.  27-28. 

50  Connolly  again  disputes  this  contention,  arguing  that  the  transition  had  been  ongoing 
for  some  time  and  that  in  reality  most  of  Ireland  was  better  suited  to  pasturage.  See  Connolly, 
Divided  Kingdom,  pp.  347-348,  350-351. 

51  Ibid.,  pp.  344-346,  359;  Linebaugh  and  Rediker,  The  Many-Headed  Hydra,  p.  187. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


311 


to  pasturage  for  commercial  purposes  as  a  root  cause  of  Irish  poverty 
and  social  dislocation.52  Landlords  enhanced  productivity  in  large  part 
by  weakening  the  bond  between  peasants  and  the  soil:  by  enclosing  and 
consolidating  the  land;  appointing  middlemen  tenants  to  further  exploit 
smallholders;  shortening  leases  to  an  annual  basis;  and  charging  excessive 
or  "rack"  rents,  among  other  tactics.  The  net  effect  was  to  force  people  onto 
ever-smaller  pieces  of  land  for  cultivation  with  their  only  recourse  to  find 
paid  employment  of  a  temporary  or  permanent  nature.  This  cottier  class 
grew  over  the  century.  Some  lost  all  ties  to  the  land  and  joined  a  swelling 
proletariat  that  sought  work  where  it  could  be  found,  on  large  farms,  in 
urban  centres,  or  across  the  Irish  Sea,  and,  indeed,  in  the  military  of  one 
power  or  another.53  Peasants  suffered  under  this  yoke  for  the  most  part, 
but  periodically  rose  up  against  landlords  and  improvers  using  clandestine 
collective  violence  to  seek  to  roll  back  change,  most  notably  in  the  Houghers 
campaign  of  agrarian  terror  of  1711-1712  and  the  Whiteboys  movement  that 
emerged  in  1761.54 

Ireland's  small  but  developing  manufacturing  sector  provided  a  main 
source  of  employment  for  the  displaced  agrarian  classes  as  well  as  crafts- 
men. Many  of  Ireland's  products  came  from  agriculture.  Improved  farms 
produced  beef,  butter,  grain,  and  (indirectly)  beer  and  flour  for  urban 
consumption  and,  more  importantly,  for  the  international  provision  trade 
(including  supplying  the  army).  The  manufacturing  sector  developed 
somewhat  more  slowly,  and  British  trade  restrictions  have  often  received 
the  blame,  especially  the  Woolens  Act  of  1699,  which  prohibited  the  export 
of  wool  and  woolen  cloth  from  anywhere  but  England.  This  situation  un- 
doubtedly harmed  the  weaving  trade,  and  protests  against  the  act  occurred 
periodically.  Still,  wool  production  for  the  domestic  market  remained  an 
important  industry.  Much  of  the  weaving  into  cloth  took  place  rurally  on 
the  putting-out  model,  with  women  spinning  yarn  in  their  households. 
Production  soared  with  the  abandonment  of  the  English  import  duty  in 
1739.55 

Linen  manufacture  concentrated  in  Ulster  constituted  the  leading  sector 
in  the  economy.  Irish  linen  production  took  off  with  the  immigration  of 

52  Connolly,  Religion,  Law,  and  Power,  pp.  49-50. 

53  James,  Ireland  in  the  Empire,  p.  217;  Miller,  Emigrants  and  Exiles,  pp.  27-28,  34,  217-218; 
Beames,  Peasants  and  Power,  pp.  6-13;  Mokyr,  Why  Ireland  Starved,  pp.  144-147. 

54  Connolly,  Religion,  Law,  and  Power,  pp.  52,  201,  219,  "The  Houghers",  Divided  Kingdom, 
pp.  300-302;  Smyth,  The  Men  of  No  Property,  pp.  33-35,  44;  Beames,  Peasants  and  Power,  p.  155. 

55  Connolly,  Religion,  Law,  and  Power,  pp.  50-52,  Divided  Kingdom,  p.  346;James,  Ireland  in  the 
Empire,  pp.  201-203. 


312 


PETER  WAY 


English  and  Scots,  and  by  the  1670s  large-scale  commercial  production  was 
already  evident.  In  1696,  England  removed  import  duty  on  Irish  linen  and  in 
1705  allowed  direct  export  to  other  colonies.  Economic  growth  transformed 
northeastern  Ireland.  Ulster's  eastern  counties  came  to  depend  on  linen 
manufacture  to  the  degree  that  they  became  net  importers  of  food.  Petty 
producers  working  in  households  carried  on  weaving  using  their  own 
yarn  or  that  purchased  on  the  market,  sometimes  employing  journeymen 
weavers.  The  spinning  of  yarn  and  weaving  of  coarse  linen  spread  west 
and  south  of  Ulster,  while  elsewhere  farmers  raised  livestock  and  crops 
to  support  industrial  towns.  The  Ulster  economy  became  overdependent 
on  linen  and  subject  to  shock  when  trade  worsened,  more  so  in  the  east 
where  agriculture  had  largely  been  abandoned.56  When  the  economy  took  a 
downturn  in  Ulster,  some  chose  to  cross  the  Atlantic  to  escape,  as  occurred 
in  1718-1729  when  thousands  left  as  a  result  of  poor  harvests,  famine,  rising 
tithes,  and  problems  within  the  linen  trade.57  The  Irish  economy  prospered 
in  the  1730s  as  the  linen  trade  grew.  Conacre  continued  spreading,  with  land 
subdivided  to  provide  small  lots  for  weavers'  subsistence  needs.  This  system 
also  exposed  them  to  any  agricultural  disruption  as  happened  in  1740, 
when  crop  failure  caused  food  prices  and  rents  to  rise,  famine  set  in,  and 
the  linen  trade  declined.  This  crisis  prompted  another  wave  of  migration, 
many  indenturing  themselves  to  get  to  the  colonies.58  As  the  linen  industry 
matured,  more  weavers  were  unable  to  set  themselves  up  as  independent 
producers.  All  those  people  who  depended  on  the  industry,  the  women 
who  spun  the  linen  and  farmers  who  grew  food  to  feed  the  linen  workers, 
also  suffered  when  trade  did.  Desperation  led  some  to  join  the  Oakboys  or 
Hearts  of  Oak,  formed  in  1763  to  protest  economic  conditions.59 

Irish  economic  development  in  the  eighteenth  century  had  a  negative  im- 
pact on  many.  While  national  wealth  and  consumption  grew  substantially 
from  1700  to  1760,  it  did  so  for  those  already  better  off.  The  majority  lived  a 
subsistence  existence  and  poverty  pervaded  society.  Cottiers  found  them- 
selves more  vulnerable  to  their  landlords,  while  the  urban  poor  crowded 
into  slums  in  the  major  cities.60  The  spread  of  commercial  agriculture  and 
manufacturing  set  many  adrift.  This  proved  particularly  the  case  at  times 

56  Connolly,  Religion,  Law,  and  Power,  pp.  51-52,  Divided  Kingdom,  pp.  351-352, 354-356;  Griffin, 
The  People  with  No  Name,  pp.  25-32. 

57  Griffin,  The  People  with  No  Name,  pp.  65-79,  88-89,  90-94,  97. 

58  Ibid.,  pp.  159-160. 

59  Connolly,  Divided  Kingdom,  pp.  302-303. 

60  James  opined  that,  on  the  whole,  conditions  for  the  Irish  poor  were  worse  than  in  England: 
James,  Ireland  in  the  Empire,  pp.  212,  222-224. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


313 


of  economic  dislocation,  such  as  the  years  1756-1757  when  bad  harvests  and 
high  prices  prevailed,  coincidentally  the  time  when  recruitment  for  the 
Seven  Years  War  first  spiked.61 

The  Seven  Years  War  affected  the  army  in  Ireland  early  on.  The  two 
regiments  sent  to  North  America  with  General  Edward  Braddock  in  1755, 
the  44th  and  48th,  had  come  from  the  Irish  establishment  at  a  peacetime 
strength  of  310  rank-and-file.  Drafting  420  men  from  regiments  in  Britain 
and  Ireland  brought  each  of  the  two  units  to  520  before  they  left  Cork.62  Such 
drafting  became  the  norm  throughout  the  war  whenever  the  government 
ordered  reinforcements  for  North  America;  whether  for  existing  regiments 
rotated  across  the  Atlantic  or  newly  raised  units,  drafts  from  those  forces 
remaining  behind  brought  them  up  to  strength.63  The  escalating  demand 
for  fighting  men  prompted  the  dispatch  of  ever  more  troops  from  the  Irish 
establishment:  in  September  1756,  the  22nd  Regiment  and  drafts  from  the 
twelve  Irish  battalions;  and  in  1757  the  17th,  27th,  28th,  43rd,  and  46th 
Regiments,  as  well  as  further  drafts.64  In  turn,  the  remaining  units  in 
Ireland  found  it  necessary  to  recruit  so  as  to  return  to  strength.  To  meet 
these  additional  manpower  demands,  Whitehall  decided  to  lift  the  ban  on 
enlisting  Irish  Protestants,  seemingly  as  early  as  1756.  In  April  of  that  year,  a 
lieutenant  of  the  Royal  American  Regiment  complained  that  recruiting  for 
the  new  unit  in  Ireland  had  been  very  difficult  as  twenty-four  companies 
were  to  be  raised  for  service  and  1,600  men  had  already  been  enlisted, 
making  for  thin  pickings.  And,  in  August,  the  Earl  of  Halifax  reported  that 
1,100  men  had  been  raised  in  Ireland  to  fill  up  the  regiments  in  America.65 
The  large  number  of  Irish  in  the  American  army  by  the  summer  of  1757 
attests  to  the  rapid  recruitment  of  Protestants  in  the  short  time  since  the 
prohibition  had  been  lifted.  The  regiments  sent  from  the  Irish  establishment 
in  1756-1757  for  which  returns  survive  exhibited  the  highest  proportion  of 
Irish  soldiers:  the  17th  (39.8  per  cent),  22nd  (41.4  per  cent),  27th  (45.8  per 
cent),  and  28th  (56.3  per  cent).  The  Irish  also  accounted  for  33.9  per  cent  of 

61  Connolly,  Religion,  Law,  and  Power,  p.  137. 

62  T[homas]  Robinson  [1st  Baron  Grantham],  Circular  to  the  Governors  in  North  America,  26 
Oct.  1754,  LO503/11  and  T.  Robinson  to  Gov.  Shirley  and  Sir  Wm.  Pepperell,  26  Oct.  1754,  LO504/11; 
Maj.  Gens.  Abercromby  and  Webb  to  Loudoun,  [26  Oct.  1756],  5832/47. 

63  On  drafting,  see,  e.g.,  Henry  Fox  to  Gov.  Lawrence,  14  Aug.  1756,  LO1486/34.  On  desertion, 
see,  e.g.,  Barrington  to  Loudoun,  15  June  1757,  LO3837/85;  D.  McDonald,  A  Return  of  the  Men 
left  by  the  62d.  Regmt.  in  Ireland,  19  Dec.  1757,  LO5042  no.  1/111];  D.  McDonald,  A  Return  of  the 
number  of  men  found  in  Ireland  belonging  to  the  62d.  Regmt.,  18  Dec.  1757,  LO5042  no.  5/111. 

64  Brumwell,  Redcoats,  pp.  19-20. 

65  George  Brereton  [to  Loudoun],  8  April  1756,  LO1026/23;  Dunk  [George  Montagu,  2nd  Earl 
of]  Halifax,  13  Aug.  1756,  LO1478/33;  Hiasinte  de  Bonneville,  28  March  1757,  LO3192/70. 


314 


PETER  WAY 


the  four  companies  of  the  New  York  Independent  Regiment,  a  clear  indica- 
tion of  the  recruiting  of  Irish  natives  in  the  American  colonies.66 

Irish  Protestants  (and  clandestine  Catholics),  dammed  up  as  a  source 
of  military  labor  by  imperial  policy  much  of  the  time,  flowed  fairly  evenly 
throughout  the  army  once  the  war-induced  need  for  men  opened  the  sluice 
gates.  The  Irish  did  not  attain  the  same  prominent  profile  in  the  army  as 
did  Highlanders.  The  contingent  basis  of  their  enlistment  made  them  seem 
more  a  last  resort,  while  the  bogeyman  of  Catholicism  complicated  their 
relation  to  the  British.  Nonetheless,  in  the  Seven  Years  War,  they  formed 
a  significant  component  of  the  army,  and  their  experience  with  improv- 
ers, landlords,  and  bosses  no  doubt  colored  their  relationships  within  the 
military. 

German  military  migrants 

The  scale  of  conflict  in  the  Seven  Years  War  strained  manpower  resources  to 
such  a  point  that  Britain  had  to  look  beyond  its  dominions  for  war  workers. 
Across  the  English  Channel  it  found  what  it  needed  in  two  forms:  foreign 
princes  willing  to  hire  out  their  military  forces;  and  individuals  who  could 
be  recruited  directed  into  the  British  Army.  Although  not  part  of  the  British 
Empire,  German  peoples  of  Europe  did  play  an  important  role  during  the 
Seven  Years  War,  both  on  the  continent  where  Prussia  proved  an  essential 
ally  and  where  mercenary  units  from  other  states  fought  in  the  British 
interest,  and  as  recruits  to  the  regular  British  Army  dispatched  to  the 
American  theatre.  Ultimately,  Britain  decided  to  fight  the  war  in  North 
America  with  its  own  army  and  to  fight  in  Europe  primarily  by  proxy.  In 
January  of  1756  Britain  signed  the  Convention  of  Westminster  with  Prussia 
to  prevent  that  state  from  siding  with  France.  Frederick  the  Great  waged 
total  war,  exploiting  resources  and  civilians  to  the  full,  and  his  policies  had 
a  significant  impact  on  western  and  northern  Germany,  which  had  been 
largely  conflict-free  since  1714.  Not  only  did  Prussia  forcibly  harness  people 
to  the  war  machine  but  also  the  ferocity  of  continental  conflict  uprooted 
many,  making  them  ripe  pickings  for  recruiters  from  various  armies.  Fred- 
erick's military  support  came  at  a  price  for  Britain,  which  promised  in  1758 
to  provide  Prussia  with  £670,000  annually  to  subsidize  its  war  effort.  At  the 


66  13  July  1757,  LO2533  no.  4/90;  [July  1757],  LO2529  no.  1/90;  13  July  1757,  LO4012  no.  1/90;  i4july 
1757,  LO1944  no.  5/90;  15  July  1757,  LO6616/88. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


315 


same  time,  Britain  assumed  the  cost  of  the  entire  Hanoverian  army,  which 
would  amount  to  £1.2  million  per  year.67 

Britain  also  hired  the  services  of  mercenary  soldiers.  With  the  decline 
of  independent  military  enterprisers,  mercenary  captains  who  hired  their 
companies  to  fight  for  other,  larger  states  found  it  difficult  to  raise  armies 
of  a  sufficient  size  from  their  own  territories.  They  could  recruit  in  foreign 
domains,  or  could  contract  units  from  another  army  to  support  their  own. 
Increasingly,  they  hired  a  specific  number  of  troops  raised  and  maintained 
by  a  foreign  power,  particularly  smaller  states  in  the  Holy  Roman  Empire, 
in  return  for  the  payment  of  a  subsidy.  Subsidizing  forces  from  abroad 
tended  to  be  faster  and  simpler  than  raising  new  regiments  at  home.  Subsidy 
agreements  also  proved  more  flexible,  as  troops  could  be  hired  for  short 
periods  and  dispensed  with  when  not  needed.  Political  considerations  also 
played  a  part,  as  subsidy  agreements  served  as  a  form  of  political  alliance 
with  mutual  responsibilities  stipulated.68  Since  the  Glorious  Revolution,  the 
British  had  depended  on  a  largely  volunteer  army,  but  could  do  this  only 
by  extensively  utilizing  foreign  soldiers.  Peter  Taylor  argued  that  the  fear 
of  a  standing  army  led  the  English  to  "subcontracting  the  defense  of  their 
liberties  and  privileges  to  Germans,  Native  Americans,  and  Africans."  The 
"tributary  overlords  of  German  territorial  states"  secured  much  English 
business  in  supplying  troops  from  within  Europe,  pushing  most  independ- 
ent military  contractors  out  of  the  market.  They  could  meet  this  demand 
for  soldiers  for  hire  as  their  subjects  legally  owed  them  military  service, 
but  in  doing  so  they  had  to  alter  the  political  economies  of  their  states.69 
Many  (including  William  Pitt)  thought  at  the  time  the  Hanoverian  regime 
of  Britain  in  fact  cared  more  about  their  status  as  Protectors  of  Hanover 
than  as  defenders  of  the  British  realm,  and  the  outbreak  of  hostilities  with 
France  in  the  colonies  in  1754  prompted  Britain  again  to  contract  with 
German  territories  -  Hesse-Cassel,  Ansbach,  and  Wiirzburg  -  to  hold  men  in 
reserve  to  help  protect  Hanover.  Hanover  itself  received  an  annual  subsidy 
of  £50,000  to  expand  its  army  by  8,000  men.  During  the  invasion  scare 
of  1756,  Britain  paid  for  twelve  Hanoverian  battalions  and  eight  Hessian 
battalions  to  be  stationed  in  the  south  of  England.70 


67  Wilson,  German  Armies,  pp.  263,  275, 277-278;  Anderson,  A  People's  Army,  pp.  298-299. 

68  Childs,  Armies  and  Warfare  in  Europe,  pp.  85-86. 

69  Taylor,  Indentured  to  Liberty,  pp.  9, 11,  21. 

70  Anderson,  Crucible  of  War,  p.  127;  Wilson,  German  Armies,  p.  263;  Houlding,  Fit  for  Service, 
p.  323,  n.  1. 


316 


PETER  WAY 


The  "military-subsidy  relationship"  England  had  with  Hesse-Cassel  sheds 
light  on  the  phenomenon.  Subsidy  treaties  usually  took  the  form  of  mutual 
defense  pacts,  with  arrangements  for  payments  made  per  man  supplied, 
a  subsidy  to  the  state  for  the  duration  of  the  war,  and  pay  for  the  soldiers. 
The  soldier's  food  would  be  paid  for  out  of  his  "subsistence"  (or  pay).  The 
British  received  soldiers  who  were  trained  and  equipped  in  return.  During 
the  Seven  Years  War,  Britain  contracted  with  Hesse-Cassel,  a  part  of  the 
Holy  Roman  Empire,  for  12,000  men  in  1755,  almost  19,000  in  1757, 12,000 
two  years  later,  and  more  than  15,000  in  1760.  From  1751  to  1760,  British 
subsidies  accounted  for  40  per  cent  of  all  state  revenue  for  Hesse-Cassel.  The 
monies  allowed  for  the  maintenance  of  a  standing  army  of  14,000  within 
the  landgravial  domain,  equivalent  to  1  soldier  per  19  Hessian  civilians,  as 
opposed  to  a  ratio  of  1  to  36  in  both  England  and  Prussia.71 

The  Hessian  state  raised  subsidy  armies  by  developing  a  military  tax, 
the  Kontribution,  for  the  training,  equipping,  and  payment  of  troops, 
but  the  increased  military  expectations  posed  ideological  problems  for 
the  Landgraves.  To  circumvent  the  novelty  and  scale  of  demands,  they 
targeted  "marginal"  people  -  the  masterless,  indolent,  those  deemed  the 
most  expendable.72  The  state  in  the  1740s  became  increasingly  intrusive  of 
the  household  and  defined  marginality  more  loosely,  taking  servants,  day 
laborers,  and  apprentices  when  it  could  not  be  demonstrated  that  their  labor 
was  essential  to  the  local  agricultural  economy.  Just  before  the  Seven  Years 
War,  the  Landgrave  promised  not  to  force  people  into  service  if  they  could 
not  be  spared  without  harming  the  household.  But  in  1762,  the  state  removed 
the  distinction  between  the  militia  and  subsidy  army,  and  all  suitable  males 
were  expected  to  serve  if  called.  This  penetrated  the  peasant  household 
more  deeply,  taking  away  from  the  head  of  household  decisions  central  to 
its  economy  and  familial  relations.73  The  nature  of  the  state,  society,  and 
economy  of  Hesse-Cassel  became  attached  to  the  dictates  of  the  British 
fiscal-military  state,  albeit  more  indirectly  than  within  Great  Britain  and 
its  colonies.  From  London,  Hessians  were  viewed  as  so  much  military  labor; 
from  Hesse-Cassel,  with  the  fortunes  of  the  state  resting  on  the  sale  of  its 
population  as  soldiers,  the  people  could  not  but  take  on  a  military  cast. 

The  British  Army  also  attempted  directly  to  exploit  the  continental 
market  in  military  labor.  Warfare  had  wracked  much  of  Europe  through- 
out the  seventeenth  century  and  into  the  eighteenth,  causing  social  and 

71  Taylor,  Indentured  to  Liberty,  pp.  1,  21-25, 36-37. 

72  Ibid.,  pp.  49-51. 

73  Ibid.,  pp.  68-70. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


317 


economic  dislocation.  In  some  areas,  as  Aaron  Fogelman's  study  of  German 
immigration  in  the  period  reveals,  the  devastation  proved  so  severe  that 
traditional  cultural  practices  had  been  subverted,  opening  the  door  for  the 
emergence  of  new  forms  of  social  relations  and  economic  production,  with 
expansive  states,  profit-minded  nobles,  and  commercially  oriented  peasants 
looking  toward  the  market.  For  many  pushed  to  the  margins,  emigration 
became  an  increasingly  attractive  option,  particularly  in  southwestern 
Germany  and  parts  of  Switzerland.  War  in  the  seventeenth  century  had 
severely  disturbed  society  in  the  region  through  depopulation,  and  sig- 
nificant change  followed  in  its  wake  during  the  decades  of  peace.  States 
grew  in  size  and  became  more  intrusive  in  village  life.  In  agriculture,  a  shift 
occurred  from  the  three-field  system  of  usage  that  included  common  land 
to  more  commercial  agriculture.  The  depopulation  caused  by  warfare  broke 
down  traditional  social  and  economic  practices  but  also  eventually  led  to 
marked  demographic  growth  and  socioeconomic  change.  As  land  proved 
readily  available,  people  began  marrying  earlier  and  setting  up  independ- 
ent households,  farmed  the  land  more  intensively,  and  practiced  partible 
inheritance.  At  the  same  time,  both  local  nobles  and  the  state  sought  to 
assert  their  control  over  their  domains  and  enhance  revenues.  Peasants 
fought  enclosure,  attempts  to  alter  inheritance  patterns  and  restrain  early 
marriage,  and  initiatives  to  push  them  into  manufacturing,  at  times  taking 
direct  action.  By  the  mid-eighteenth  century,  however,  population  growth 
peaked  and  landholdings  were  becoming  too  small  to  support  a  family. 
These  processes  led  to  a  wave  of  emigration.74 

The  labor  demands  for  the  all-out  North  American  offensive  were  such 
that  the  army  turned  to  the  continent  to  fill  out  the  ranks.  Britain's  Hano- 
verian dynasty  and  Protestant  faith  made  Germans  an  obvious  source  to 
tap.  Thus,  when  in  February  1756,  the  government  decided  to  raise  a  new 
regiment  from  among  the  Germans  and  Swiss  resident  in  America  to  be 
called  the  Royal  Americans  (the  62nd,  later  60th,  Regiment),  seasoned  non- 
commissioned officers  (NCOs)  and  soldiers  were  to  be  enlisted  in  Holland, 
Germany,  and  Switzerland  to  complement  these  raw  recruits.  Recruiting 
orders  did  stipulate  "none  but  healthy  Steady  Men  being  protestants,  and  as 
many  as  he  can  procure  who  have  already  been  in  the  Service".  The  recruits 
should  be  between  eighteen  and  thirty-five  years  old,  ^2"  or  taller,  and  no 
Frenchmen  were  to  be  taken.  To  secure  as  many  recruits  as  possible,  the 
army  allowed  the  colonel  some  money  "for  the  passage  of  a  small  number 
of  Women  and  Children,  which  he  will  be  indispensably  [sic]  Obliged  to 


74   Fogelman,  Hopeful  Journeys,  pp.  6, 16, 18-28,  48-65. 


318 


PETER  WAY 


take  for  the  Success  of  the  Affair  and  the  acquisition  of  proper  Men".75  The 
British  in  Frankfurt  and  Cologne  found  they  were  competing  with  recruit- 
ers from  the  imperial  Prussian  and  Danish  armies  and  were  having  some 
trouble  meeting  their  requirements.  The  pickings  proved  so  thin  that  one 
officer  suggested  getting  men  as  indentured  servants  for  America  and  then 
converting  them  to  soldiers,  presumably  against  their  will.76  But  in  April, 
one  recruiter  reported  that  he  expected  to  raise  100  good  men  in  Germany. 
Later  in  August,  he  noted  that,  while  the  recruits  seemed  fairly  good,  he  had 
hoped  for  more  experienced  soldiers,  or  tradesmen,  but  they  were  recruiting 
late  in  the  season.  An  officer  in  New  York  upon  reviewing  these  German 
recruits  for  the  Royal  Americans,  complained  that  the  majority  were  "Raw 
men",  while  he  also  discovered  "12  strange  little  Lads  they  Call  Miners"  and 
ten  boys  for  drummers.77 

A  glimpse  into  the  nature  of  the  German  influx  into  the  army  can  be 
found  in  one  particular  recruiting  document  of  troops  raised  in  Europe  for 
service  in  the  Royal  Americans  by  Herbert,  Baron  de  Munster.78  The  data 
reveals  that  94  of  the  152  men  recruited  as  privates  and  noncommissioned 
officers  (61.8  per  cent)  reported  having  prior  occupations,  each  with  some 
specific  skill  ranging  from  gardener  to  peruke-maker  but  with  only  brewers, 
miners,  and  tailors  reaching  double  figures.  No  one  listed  farmer  or  laborer, 
although  it  is  safe  to  assume  that  some  of  the  fifty-eight  individuals  who 
returned  no  occupation  had  performed  manual  labor  or  came  from  family 
farms.  Recruits  averaged  twenty-four  years  of  age,  typical  for  the  army  as  a 
whole,  and  it  is  likely  that  some  had  not  yet  set  up  independent  households. 
Most  appear  to  have  come  from  German  principalities,  with  Switzerland 
at  twelve  recruits  the  next  most  likely  place  of  nativity,  but  others  hailed 
from  as  far  afield  as  Scotland  (two  NCOs),  Poland,  and  Bohemia.  Clusters  of 
recruits  came  from  individual  places,  as  well:  four  from  Basel,  Switzerland; 
ten  from  Darmstadt  in  Hesse;  ten  from  Frankfurt  in  Hesse;  five  from  Frein- 
sheim  in  the  Palatinate;  and  nine  listing  Saxony  as  their  birthplace.  These 
recruits  came  from  mixed  occupational  backgrounds,  but  one  instance 

75  Plan  for  recruiting  in  Germany  [Feb.  1756],  LO2576/19.  The  army  also  enlisted  German 
Protestants  from  the  prisoners  of  war  of  the  French  army  held  at  Portsmouth.  See  Earl  Loud- 
oun, Memorandum  Books,  HM  1717,  vol.  10, 11  March  1756,  Manuscript  Department,  Henry  E. 
Huntington  Library,  San  Marino,  California. 

76  Joseph  Yorke  to  Maj.  Gen.  Napier,  23  March  1756,  LO959/21. 

77  James  Prevost  to  [Loudoun],  7  April  1756,  LO1024/23;  Prevost  [to  Loudoun],  14  Aug.  1756, 
LOi4gi/34;John Young  [to  Loudoun],  2  Sept.  1756,  LO1681/38. 

78  List  of  Recruits  under  Command  of  Herbert,  Baron  de  Munster . . .  arrived  the  27th  of  August 
at  New  York,  1756,  LO1607/37. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


319 


occurs  of  people  of  a  particular  occupation  from  the  same  town  enlisting. 
Thirteen  miners  signed  up  from  Clausdal  (Clausthal)  in  Saxony  in  the  Harz 
Mountains,  a  town  that  since  the  sixteenth  century  had  been  associated 
with  the  iron-mining  industry  promoted  by  the  dukes  of  Brunswick.  It  is 
not  clear  what  prompted  this  exodus  from  mining  in  Clausdal,  but  these 
individuals  likely  were  the  "12  strange  little  Lads  they  Call  Miners"  the  Royal 
American  officer  referred  to  upon  their  arrival  in  New  York. 

The  regimental  returns  from  1757  showed  607  foreigners  enlisted  in 
Europe  with  the  army  in  America,  or  4.3  per  cent  of  the  whole.  The  Royal 
Americans  had  also  been  active  in  recruiting  foreigners  in  America.  The 
returns  show  803  such  recruits  in  1757,  but  it  is  not  clear  whether  this  figure 
included  Scots  and  Irish  recruited  in  the  colonies  as  well  as  Germans,  al- 
though the  army  sent  German-speaking  recruiting  officers  to  Pennsylvania 
and  posted  recruiting  announcements  in  "Dutch".79  A  clearer  example  of  the 
German  presence  as  a  whole  lies  in  the  dispersion  of  foreigners  throughout 
the  regiments.  Seven  of  seventeen  units  returned  no  foreigners  recruited  in 
America,  and  507  of  the  803  men  (63.1  per  cent)  had  found  homes  in  the  four 
battalions  of  the  Royal  American  Regiment,  the  one  specifically  raised  from 
Germans  in  the  colonies.80  This  regiment  also  had  commissioned  officers 
from  Europe  who  spoke  German. 

Wars  past  and  rapid  socioeconomic  change  yielded  a  harvest  of  men  from 
German  Europe  to  fight  in  the  red  coat  of  Britain  in  the  Seven  Years  War. 
At  the  same  time,  the  desire  of  some  heads  of  small  states  to  profit  from 
bartering  their  military  labor  power  to  Britain  condemned  their  people  to 
wage  war  not  of  their  own  making.  Britain's  war  industry  proved  blind  to 
national  or  ethnic  boundaries  when  it  came  to  filling  the  ranks. 

America,  reluctant  recruiting  ground 

Lord  Loudoun,  commander-in-chief  of  the  American  army,  arrived  in  New 
York  on  23  July  1756,  and  shortly  thereafter  began  expressing  his  opinions  of 
colonials.  The  general  wrote  in  late  August  that  colonials  "have  assumed  to 
themselves  what  they  Call  Rights  and  Priviledges,  Tottaly  unknown  in  the 
Mother  Country  and  are  made  use  of,  for  no  purpose,  but  to  screen  them, 
from  giveing  any  aid,  of  any  sort,  for  carrying  on  the  Service".81  Relations 

79  Samuel  Kemble  to  Capt.  William  Skinner,  22  July  1756,  LO1324/30. 

80  From  an  analysis  of  the  returns  utilized  in  Table  10.1. 

81  [Loudoun]  to  Cumberland,  29  Aug.  1756,  LO1626/52. 


320 


PETER  WAY 


between  the  army  and  colonists  soon  had  congealed  into  bad  blood  and  they 
grew  only  more  heated  under  Loudoun's  vice-regal  rule.  Conflict  erupted 
between  the  army  and  the  colonies  over  issues  of  provisioning,  quartering, 
and  trade,  but  the  mobilization  of  military  manpower  constituted  a  root 
source  of  disagreement.  Raising  an  army  in  America  brought  the  fiscal- 
military  state  across  the  Atlantic  and  to  colonies  that  had  little  experience 
of  the  military  revolution.  Attempting  to  extract  even  a  small  proportion  of 
the  British  Army  from  the  colonies  cut  into  the  heart  of  local  economies  and 
made  the  British-American  relationship  all  too  frequently  an  adversarial 
one,  as  a  Chester  County,  Pennsylvania,  tavern-keeper  made  all  too  clear. 
On  12  December  1757,  John  Baldwin  discovered  Sergeant  James  Jobb  of  the 
New  York  Independent  Companies  attempting  to  enlist  two  young  men 
and  "Swore  by  God  that  he  would  beat  the  brains  of  any  Scoundrell  Soldier" 
recruiting  in  his  inn.  The  sergeant  "answer'd  that  he  had  Lord  Loudoun's 
Orders  for  what  he  was  about",  to  which  Baldwin  replied,  "God  Dam  Lord 
Loudoun  and  his  Army  too,  they  are  all  Scoundrells  and  a  burden  upon  the 
Country  [.]  What  had  he  or  his  Army  done  Since  their  comeing  but  deprived 
the  people  of  their  hands  [indentured  servants  and  hired  laborers],  and  if 
the  Country  Served  them  right  they  would  kick  them  all  out,  like  a  parcel 
of  Scoundrells,  as  they  are,  for  they  would  never  do  the  Country  any  good." 
Baldwin  then  attacked  Jobb,  wounding  him,  while  his  friends  attacked 
the  recruiting  party,  causing  them  to  flee.  Two  days  later,  Baldwin  and 
his  companions  disrupted  Jobb  and  his  party  when  recruiting  in  another 
tavern  in  Wilmington,  Delaware,  leading  to  a  "Ryot"  and  the  wounding  of 
several  soldiers. 8z  Baldwin  had  laid  his  hands  not  only  on  one  poor  recruiting 
sergeant,  but  also  on  the  pulse  of  the  conflict  over  recruiting:  who  would 
control  America's  labor,  army  officers  or  colonial  masters,  and  to  what 
ends,  state  or  private? 

The  supply  of  military  labor,  both  the  provincial  troops  raised  by  the  colo- 
nies and  the  regular  troops  recruited  by  the  army  in  the  colonies,  provided 
a  flashpoint  for  internecine  conflict.  Every  year  the  commander-in-chief 
informed  the  colonial  governors  of  the  number  of  provincial  troops  he 
expected  the  colonies  to  raise  for  the  campaign.  The  scale  of  mobiliza- 
tion demanded  by  the  British  eclipsed  past  war  efforts  and  the  economic 
wherewithal  of  the  colonies,  so  foot-dragging  naturally  occurred.  The  often- 
strained  relations  between  the  executive  and  legislative  branches  of  colonial 
governments,  the  assemblies'  control  of  the  purse  strings,  and  in  certain 
instances  the  prevalence  of  internal  sectarian  politics  meant  the  number  of 


82   Information  of  James  Jobb,  14  Dec.  1757,  LO5011/111. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


321 


provincial  troops  actually  fielded  often  fell  well  short  of  those  requested.  For 
example,  the  army  requested  9,000  provincial  troops  for  the  1756  campaign 
against  Fort  Crown  Point  and  the  provinces  fielded  6,434  privates  and  NCOs. 
And  General  James  Abercromby  called  for  20,000  provincial  troops  in  total 
for  the  1758  campaign  and,  although  this  was  supported  by  Pitt's  promise  to 
reimburse  the  colonial  governments,  in  April  he  reported  that  fewer  than 
18,000  had  mobilized.83 

Constitutional  concerns  regarding  the  exercise  of  imperial  powers  only 
partly  explain  the  colonies'  reluctance  to  mobilize  on  the  scale  expected 
of  them.  The  negative  impact  of  extracting  so  many  men  from  the  civil 
economy  worried  officials,  but  so  did  the  fact  that  broad  mobilization  caught 
up  those  of  a  status  not  normally  expected  to  serve  in  the  ranks.  Governor 
Thomas  Pownall  explained  Massachusetts's  failure  to  meet  Abercromby's 
request  for  provincial  troops  in  1758  in  terms  that  revealed  the  same  class 
politics  operated  in  the  colonies  as  did  in  Britain. 

I  believe  the  real  Truth  is  in  attempting  to  raise  7,000  Men,  we  have 
overeached  our  Strength,  the  last  thousand  edges  too  near  upon  those 
who  from  their  Situation  &  Circumstances  thought  it  would  not  come 
to  their  Share  [...]  Laws  will  execute  themselves  while  they  extend 
only  to  a  given  rank  of  Men,  but  when  they  begin  to  entrench  upon 
a  Rank  above  that,  you  are  sensible  how  much  they  labour  and  are 
obstructed.84 

Class  status  played  a  key  role  in  provincial  mobilization  throughout  the  war. 
The  colonial  assemblies  forced  men  into  service  in  their  regiments,  while 
the  usual  allowance  of  the  provision  of  a  substitute  worked  to  ensure  most 
draftees  came  from  the  laboring  classes.85  Colonial  leaders  thus  did  not 
scruple  at  forcing  many  of  their  own  citizens  into  the  provincial  regiments, 

83  James  Abercromby,  Return  of  Provincial  Forces  of  the  Several  Colonies  raised  for  the  reduc- 
tion of  Crown  Point,  26  June,  1756,  LO1254/28;  W[illiam]  Shirley  to  Sir  Thomas  Robinson,  11 
Aug.  1755,  LO622/13;  Massachusetts  General  Court,  Resolutions  regarding  Crown  Point,  14  Jan. 
1756,  LO759/17;  Connecticut  General  Assembly,  Resolution  on  the  raising  of  men  and  money 
for  operations  in  1756,  21  Jan.  1756,  LO763/17;  [Abercromby]  Circular  Letter  to  the  Governors 
of  Maryland,  Pennsylvania,  and  Virginia,  15  March  1758,  no.  45,  box  1,  Abercromby  Papers, 
Huntington  Library  [henceforth  in  form  AB45/1];  [Abercromby]  to  Wm.  Pitt,  28  April  1758, 
AB215/5. 

84  Pownall  to  Abercromby,  19  June  1758,  AB366/8. 

85  Anderson,  A  People's  Army,  pp.  41-42;  Cress,  Citizens  in  Arms,  pp.  5-7;  Selesky,  War  and  Society 
in  Colonial  Connecticut,  pp.  155-162;  Titus,  The  Old  Dominion  at  War,  pp.  59, 63-65, 79-80, 98-100, 
145-148;  Ferling,  "Soldiers  for  Virginia",  p.  316. 


322 


PETER  WAY 


but  balked  when  their  own  class  confronted  the  possibility  of  having  to 
serve  in  the  front  ranks. 

The  colonies  took  advantage  of  their  control  over  the  raising  and  provi- 
sioning of  provincial  troops  to  limit  the  impact  of  mobilization;  however, 
the  army  exercised  direct  authority  in  the  recruiting  of  colonials  to  the 
regular  forces,  and  this  subject  proved  more  contentious  in  the  British- 
American  relationship.  Colonial  resistance  to  British  recruitment  to  the 
armed  services,  in  particular  impressment  to  the  Royal  Navy,  had  a  long 
tradition.86  In  the  Seven  Years  War,  however,  the  enlistment  of  volunteers 
to  the  army  provoked  much  controversy,  superficially  because  of  the  tactics 
used  in  recruitment,  but  at  root  due  to  the  impact  mass  mobilization  had 
on  the  labor  requirements  of  the  colonial  economies. 

Enlisting  in  America  ran  essentially  the  same  as  in  Britain,  even  though 
the  part  of  the  Mutiny  Act  dealing  with  recruitment  did  not  apply  until 
1756.  Recruiters  were  allowed  levy  money  for  each  man,  from  which  they 
had  to  provide  necessaries,  provisions,  and  transportation,  as  well  as  offer 
a  bounty  to  lure  men  into  the  service.  But  commanding  officers  pressured 
them  "to  get  the  Recruits  as  cheap  as  you  can".87  Recruiting  officers,  in  their 
rush  to  man  the  army,  at  times  stooped  to  trickery,  and  this  inflamed  public 
opinion.  James  McDonell  claimed  that,  while  drinking  with  a  friend,  he 
fell  in  with  a  recruiting  party  from  the  New  York  Independent  Companies, 
"as  he  was  told  next  Morning,  being  that  Night  so  Drunk  that  he  doth  not 
remember  seeing  a  Red  Coat  in  the  house,  and  was  greatly  surprised  in  the 
Morning  when  the  said  Corporal  told  him  he  was  enlisted".  He  deserted  and 
received  200  lashes  in  punishment.88  Other  prospects  could  require  greater 
subtlety.  A  Royal  Americans  recruiting  party  owed  Joshua  Boud  money  for 
food  and  lodging  in  his  public  house.  He  took  a  dollar,  he  thought  in  pay- 
ment, but  the  soldiers  said  he  had  enlisted  and  took  him  before  a  magistrate, 
who,  despite  his  refusal  to  enlist,  confined  him  without  subsistence  until 
he  yielded.89 

Sharp  recruiting  practices,  acknowledged  and  tolerated  to  a  degree  in 
Britain,  prompted  more  controversy  in  the  colonies,  and  to  an  extent  tainted 
all  recruiting  for  the  regular  army.  Horatio  Sharpe,  Maryland's  governor, 

86  Most  notably,  a  November  1747  impressment  riot  in  Boston.  See  Rogers,  Empire  and  Liberty, 
pp.  38-40;  Brunsman,  "The  Knowles  Atlantic  Impressment  Riots  of  the  1740s". 

87  Lt  Col  Gage's  Recruiting  Instructions,  [3  Jan.  1758],  LO5328/115.  Levying  recruits  to  the 
Royal  American  regiment  required  an  estimated  £5  per  man  in  1756.  See  Estimate  of  the  several 
Articles  of  Expense  on  the  American  Service,  [March  1756],  LO6738/22. 

88  WO/71/65/361-366, 14 July  1757- 

89  Joshua  Boude,  Petition  to  Loudoun  [1756],  LO2456/57. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


323 


informed  Loudoun  that  recruiting  parties  for  the  44th  and  48th  Regiments 
had  attacked  a  vessel  in  a  river  and  assaulted  several  persons,  including  a 
County  High  Sheriff  in  his  own  house.90  Some  citizens  brought  "Vexatious 
Suits"  in  the  courts  of  law  against  recruiting  officers  for  performing  their 
duties.91  Debts  owed  by  putative  recruits  were  invented  or  inflated  and  the 
men  got  themselves  incarcerated  to  prevent  their  having  to  join  the  army.92 
Colonists  could  turn  to  violence  if  obstruction  did  not  work.  A  Philadelphia 
mob  attacked  recruiters  in  1756,  beating  a  sergeant  to  death,  jailing  the  rest, 
and  liberating  the  enlisted  men.93  Three  riots  took  place  in  Wilmington,  Dela- 
ware, in  the  fall  of  1757,  in  which  recruiters  suffered  beatings.  Although  the 
recruiting  officer  knew  the  identity  of  the  mob  leaders,  he  did  not  trust  local 
authorities  to  prosecute.94  "I  have  had  my  party  out  in  the  Country  but  they 
generally  get  Mob'd",  Captain  Mackay  reported  from  Portsmouth,  Maine, 
in  December  1757;  "one  of  them  was  beat  in  the  Streets  the  other  Evening 
by  five  Sailors,  as  yet  I  can  make  no  discovery  of  the  Authors,  but  I  have  a 
warrant  out  against  one  who  has  taken  the  liberty  to  threaten".95  In  Boston 
on  February  3, 1758  a  "Broil  [...]  between  a  Mob,  &  some  of  the  Recruiting 
Parties"  took  place  over  NCOs  allegedly  committing  "some  imprudences  that 
hurt  ye  Service.  To  see  a  Drunken  Man  lugg'd  thro'  ye  Streets  on  a  Souldiers 
back  guarded  by  others  wither  it  was  or  was  not  to  carry  him  before  a  Justice 
to  swear  must  certainly  give  a  Strong  impression  of  ye  method  of  enlist- 
ing &  certainly  have  an  ill  effect  on  an  inflam'd  Mobb",  warned  Governor 
Pownall  of  Massachusetts.  However,  Boston  justices  investigated  the  "Noise 

6  Tumult"  and  attributed  it  to  "some  mistaken  apprehensions  among  some 
Young  and  undesigning  Persons".96  Questionable  recruiting  practices  help 
explain  some  of  the  colonial  opposition  to  the  mobilization  of  manpower, 
but  deeper  social  and  economic  factors  also  played  a  role. 

The  struggle  over  labor  most  clearly  evinced  itself  in  the  army's  recruit- 
ment of  indentured  servants.  From  the  military's  perspective,  the  need 
for  fighting  men  trumped  all  other  concerns  during  wartime;  to  masters 

90  Horatio  Sharpe  to  Loudoun,  18  May  1757,  LO6353/80. 

91  In  one  instance,  the  44th  Regiment  had  to  pay  the  attorney  general  of  the  Jersies  £12. 16s.  for 
defending  recruiting  officers  from  such  suits:  John  Duncan,  44th  Regiment  of  Foot  on  Account 
of  Recruiting  &c  for  the  Year  1757,  24  June  1757,  LO6600/86. 

92  Weekly  Returns  of  the  Recruiting  Parties  of  Capt.  Mackay,  Lt  Cottnam  and  Ens.  Archbold  for 
the  40th  Regiment,  Jan.  1758,  LO6919/118;  Samuel  Mackay  to  Col  Forbes,  6  Feb.  1758,  LO5549/119. 

93  Pargellis,  Lord  Loudoun  in  North  America,  p.  107;  Rogers,  Empire  and  Liberty,  p.  42. 

94  Capt.  Charles  Cruickshank  to  Loudoun,  14  Dec.  1757,  LO5012/111. 

95  Samuel  Mackay  to  Col  Forbes,  16  Dec.  1757,  LO5023/111. 

96  T.  Pownall  to  Loudoun,  6, 13  Feb.  1758,  LO5547/119,  LO5569/120;  Boston  justices  to  Pownall, 

7  Feb.  1758,  LO5550/119. 


324 


PETER  WAY 


who  viewed  their  servants  as  commodities,  enlistment  constituted  theft. 
Instructions  for  raising  the  regiments  for  the  1755  campaign  indicated 
that  indentured  servants  should  not  enlist  without  the  consent  of  their 
masters,97  but  in  the  wake  of  Braddock's  defeat  the  need  to  bring  the  regi- 
ments up  to  strength  led  Governor  William  Shirley  of  Massachusetts,  acting 
commander-in-chief,  to  remove  this  exception.  By  February  1756,  a  crisis 
brewed.  Horatio  Sharpe  warned  that  masters,  "having  a  great  part  of  their 
Property  vested  in  Servants",  were  outraged  by  the  practice,  and  expressed 
fears  that  "an  Insurrection  of  the  People  is  likely  to  ensue".98  Corbin  Lee, 
who  managed  an  iron  forge  in  Maryland  worked  by  indentured  servants, 
complained  not  only  of  the  loss  of  the  labor  but  also  of  the  tactics  practiced 
by  recruiters.  "It  is  not  unusual  with  many  of  these  recruiting  Gentlemen 
when  they  meet  with  a  person  that  will  not  be  bullied  out  of  his  Property 
and  tamely  give  up  his  Servant  without  any  sort  of  Recompense  immediately 
to  deem  him  an  Enemy  to  his  Majesty's  Service."  He  believed  the  actions 
of  the  recruiting  officer  to  be  "Illegal  nay  felonious;  for  they  stole  into  our 
Plantations  disguis'd  like  thieves  in  the  dead  of  night  made  our  Servants 
Drunk  forced  them  to  inlist  and  curried  them  off".99  The  Pennsylvania 
General  Assembly  advised  the  lieutenant  governor  that  many  masters  had 
complained  "a  great  Number  of  Bought  Servants  are  lately  inlisted  by  the 
Recruiting  Officers  now  in  this  Province,  and  clandestinely  or  by  open 
Force  conveyed  away",  yet  according  to  the  law  masters  possessed  "as  true 
&  as  just  a  Property  in  the  Servant  bought  as  they  had  before  in  the  Money 
with  which  he  was  purchas'd".100 

Complaints  soon  turned  to  legal  action.  "The  officers  have  been  arrested 
for  entertaining  these  Servants,  Violences  used  by  the  Populace"  in  Penn- 
sylvania and  Maryland  "for  recovering  them  from  the  Officers,  and  the 
Servants  imprison'd  for  inlisting",  lamented  William  Shirley.  He  looked  to 
the  king  to  establish  a  policy  in  an  attempt  to  allay  "the  present  disputes 
&  Heart-burnings".  Masters  of  two  servants  enlisted  in  New  York  sued  the 
recruiting  lieutenant  of  the  48th  Regiment  in  1756,  and  he  had  to  post  bail 
or  be  jailed.  That  same  year  several  Pennsylvania  masters  initiated  legal 
proceedings  against  recruiters.  Colonial  lawyers,  revealingly,  argued  that 
servants,  as  property,  had  no  free  will,  and  thus  could  not  be  taken  against 

97  Recruiting  Instructions  [1755],  LO727/15. 

98  Horatio  Sharpe  to  William  Shirley,  2  Feb.  1756,  LO793/186. 

99  Corbin  Lee  to  Gov.  Horatio  Sharp,  30  April  1757,  LO3506/76. 

100  Pennsylvania,  General  Assembly,  House  of  Representatives,  Address  to  Robert  Hunter 
Morris,  11  Feb.  1756,  LO819/18. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


325 


their  masters'  wishes.101  Direct  action  against  recruiters  also  occurred.  Pieter 
Van  Ingen  of  the  Royal  Americans  enlisted  a  servant  of  Samuel  Henry  at 
Trenton,  Newjersey,  in  August  1756.  Henry  later  confronted  him  in  a  tavern 
demanding  his  servant  or  money  in  recompense,  striking  him  on  the  head 
with  an  iron-tipped  cane  when  he  refused.  Van  Ingen  chased  him  off  with 
his  sword,  but  Henry  returned  with  friends  in  an  attempt  to  capture  the 
servant.  Again  the  recruiting  party  drove  them  off.  When  they  tried  to 
leave,  though,  Henry  attacked  Van  Ingen  with  a  pitchfork,  which  he  parried 
with  his  sword.  He  retreated  inside  and  had  his  men  fasten  knives  to  poles. 
They  sallied  forth  and  routed  Henry's  party,  which  surrendered  the  field 
and  the  servant.  But  when  mob  rule  failed,  Henry  turned  to  the  law,  and 
had  a  justice  send  a  constable  to  Van  Ingen  demanding  he  give  up  the  man 
or  the  money,  or  go  to  jail.  Van  Ingen  refused  and  a  writ  was  served  upon 
him,  and  he  was  jailed  in  a  "Stinking"  cell  despite  the  protest  of  his  colonel 
as  to  the  illegality  of  his  imprisonment.102 

The  ongoing  furore  over  recruitment  necessitated  state  intervention. 
Parliament  extended  the  Mutiny  Act  to  the  colonies  and  adopted  legislation 
on  the  recruitment  of  both  free  individuals  and  indentured  servants  in  March 
1756.103  To  quell  any  complaints  that  free  men  had  been  duped  into  enlisting, 
the  law  required  a  recruit  to  be  taken  to  a  justice  of  the  peace  after  twenty-four 
hours  and  within  four  days  of  his  listing  to  swear  to  his  willingness  to  enlist.  If 
he  balked,  he  had  to  return  the  levy  money  and  pay  20s  sterling  for  expenses; 
otherwise  he  was  considered  enlisted.  The  act  also  addressed  the  thorny  issue 
of  recruiting  indentured  servants,  making  it  lawful  to  recruit  indentured 
servants  who  volunteered,  but  stipulated  that,  if  the  owner  protested  within 
six  months,  the  recruiting  officer  must  either  give  up  the  servant  upon  being 
repaid  the  enlisting  money,  or  pay  the  master  a  sum  to  be  determined  by  two 
justices  of  the  peace  based  on  the  original  purchase  price  and  the  amount  of 
time  left  to  be  served.104  Parliament  with  this  act  codified  the  fiscal-military 
state's  premise  that  the  army's  need  for  manpower  prevailed  over  private 

101  William  Shirley  [to  Henry  Fox],  8  March  1756,  LO890/20;  Shirley  to  Robert  Hunter  Morris, 
20  Feb.  1756,  in  Lincoln,  Correspondence  of  William  Shirley,  II,  pp.  391-392,  n.  1;  Robert  Sterling 
to  Loudoun,  23  Aug.  1756,  LO1548/35;  Major  Rutherford  [to  Loudoun],  23  Aug.  1756,  LO1549/35; 
Charles  Hardy  to  Lord  Halifax,  7  May  1756,  inPargellis,  Military  Affairs  in  North  America,  7748- 
1765,  pp.  174-175- 

102  Pieter  Van  Ingen,  Affidavit,  18  April  1757,  LO3376/74;  James  Prevost  [to  Loudoun],  5  April 
1757,  LO3294/72;  John  Smyth,  certificate,  6  April  1757,  LO3300/73. 

103  Great  Britain,  Parliament  [An  act  for  the  better  recruiting  of  His  Majesty's  Forces  on  the 
Continent  of  America;  and  for  the  Regulation  of  the  Army . . .].  25  March  1756,  LO2583/21. 

104  In  response,  Benjamin  Franklin  filed  a  petition  on  behalf  of  fellow  Pennsylvania  masters 
claiming  £3,652  and  a  half  pence  Pennsylvania  currency  for  612  servants  listed:  List  of  Servants 


326 


PETER  WAY 


interest,  whether  communal  or  familial  concern  for  the  liberty  of  individu- 
als who  enlisted,  or  masters'  property  in  human  labor  for  the  purpose  of 
individual  economic  gain.  In  taking  this  position  the  act  effectively  made  the 
army  the  preeminent  employer  of  labor  in  the  colonies,  at  once  master  to  free 
laborers  and  bonded  servants  purchased  from  reluctant  owners. 

The  recruiting  legislation  did  not  prevent  conflict  from  occurring  over 
mobilization  in  the  colonies,  however,  as  it  did  not  remove  the  root  issue  of 
control  of  labor  power.  "We  shall  have  a  great  deal  of  difficulty  to  recruit  of 
our  Regiment",  confessed  an  officer,  "the  People  of  this  Country  having  no 
great  affection  for  a  red  Coat,  nor  do  they  stay  long  with  us  after  they  list 
when  they  find  an  opportunity  to  take  their  leave."  Another  complained 
"there  is  a  general  backwardness  in  the  people  of  this  province  to  the  Kings 
service,  which  is  but  too  much  encouraged  by  all  sorts  of  people,  as  they 
seem  to  consider  every  man,  we  enlist,  as  a  real  loss  to  the  Province".105  Thus 
regiments  in  Halifax  found  it  necessary  to  recruit  as  far  south  as  Maryland 
in  1756,  having  more  luck  the  further  south  they  went,  whereas  those  in 
South  Carolina  two  years  later  had  to  strike  300  miles  northward.106  The 
physical  requirements  were  also  lowered  with  any  man  "free  from  Ruptures, 
Convulsions,  and  Infirmities,  and  fit  for  service",  being  acceptable.  In  1758, 
Loudoun  remarked  that  if  the  army  wanted  to  get  "fighting  men,  We  must 
not  at  present  Insist  either  on  Size  or  Beauty".  Perhaps  this  explains  how 
John  Rainsdown,  described  as  "hump  back'd,  crook'd  Legs,  and  4  feet  6 
inches  high",  got  into  the  Royal  Americans.107  Still,  the  army  operated  well 
below  its  strength  on  paper.  Such  reluctance  to  serve  in  the  regulars  played 
a  role  in  Pitt's  decision  to  send  ever  more  regular  regiments  to  America. 

The  army  competed  directly  with  other  employers  for  labor  but  govern- 
ment policy  limited  what  they  could  offer  recruits.  The  colonial  provincial 
regiments  in  particular  monopolized  men  of  recruiting  age  because  they 
offered  better  terms  of  employment.  The  provinces  paid  higher  bounties 


Belonging  to  the  inhabitants  of  Pennsylvania  and  taken  into  His  Majesty's  Service,  21  April  1757, 
L0341/74- 

105  William  Eyre  to  Col  Napier,  23  Jan.  1756,  LO766/17;  John  Cosnan  to  Col  Forbes,  9  Jan.  1758, 
LO5377/116. 

106  Charles  Lawrence  to  Loudoun,  19  Oct.  1756,  LO2042/46;  Officers  belonging  to  the  Regiments 
in  Nova  Scotia  upon  Recruiting  Duty,  [9  Nov.  1756],  LO2186/50;  John  Tulleken  [to  Loudoun],  29 
Jan.  1758,  LO5486/118. 

107  Pargellis,  Lord  Loudoun  in  North  America,  pp.  110-111;  [Loudoun]  to  Maj.  Gen.  Hopson,  23 
Jan.  1758,  LO5451/117;  Arthur  Nicholson,  Return  of  Men  found  unfit  for  Service,  23  April  1757, 
LO3433,  box  74. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


327 


than  the  typical  £3  inducement  for  regular  recruits.108  The  regular  army's 
term  of  service  also  played  a  role  as  well.  As  a  rule,  men  enlisted  for  life 
during  peacetime.  The  need  for  ever  more  bodies  during  wartime,  however, 
forced  the  army  at  times  to  offer  short-term  service,  usually  three  to  five 
years,  but  sometimes  fewer.  Nonetheless,  life  enlistment  remained  the 
basic  experience  of  regular  troops  in  the  Seven  Years  War.109  By  comparison, 
provincial  soldiers  typically  signed  on  for  the  campaign,  usually  spring 
through  fall.  Provincial  service  paid  better  wages  as  well.  Regular  soldiers 
received  a  daily  wage  of  eight  pence,  two  of  which  were  deducted  as  "off- 
reckonings" for  payments  to  various  offices  (the  Exchequer,  Paymaster 
General,  Chelsea  Hospital,  the  regimental  agent),  and  to  provide  the  troops' 
annual  regimental  clothing,  necessaries,  and  accoutrements  (a  further 
seven  pence  per  week  went  to  the  regimental  surgeon  and  paymaster,  and 
to  cover  company  expenses  for  a  man's  "necessaries"  like  shoes,  gaiters,  arms 
repair,  and  barbering).110  Fred  Anderson,  for  example,  calculated  the  net 
income  (wage,  food,  and  lodging)  of  a  Massachusetts  soldier  at  2s  provincial 
currency  per  day,  or  roughly  twice  that  of  a  regular.111  Virginia  provincials, 
by  comparison,  received  only  8d  a  day  local  currency  (worth  40-70  per 
cent  of  sterling),  which  compared  unfavorably  to  the  2-3S  a  day  wages  for 
unskilled  labor  or  to  the  earnings  of  provincials  in  neighboring  colonies,  no 
doubt  contributing  to  the  need  for  the  colony  to  conscript  troops  in  the  war's 
early  years  and  to  offer  higher  bounties  later  on.112  The  average  wage  for  the 
provincials  from  the  more  northerly  colonies  who  did  most  of  the  fighting, 
however,  was  significantly  more  than  their  redcoated  comrades  in  arms. 

Many  colonists  did  join  the  regulars  despite  all  the  conflict  surrounding 
recruitment,  especially  in  the  first  two  years  of  the  war.  For  the  regiments 
that  returned  the  nativity  of  troops  in  1757,  those  born  in  the  American 
colonies  accounted  for  755  of  14,166  men  (5.3  per  cent)  and  natives  of  Europe 
enlisted  in  the  colonies  for  803  (5.7  per  cent),  making  more  than  one  in 

108  For  example,  Massachusetts  bounties  inflated  from  £3-£4  in  1755  to  a  peak  of  more  than 
£26  in  1760.  See  Anderson,  A  People's  Army,  p.  225. 

109  For  example,  the  45th  Regiment,  which  had  been  stationed  in  Halifax  since  the  previous 
war  and  had  recruited  extensively  in  North  America,  reported  in  1757  that  of  its  955  soldiers:  819 
(85.8  per  cent)  had  enlisted  for  life,  1  for  twenty  years  (0.1  per  cent),  1  for  seven  (0.1  per  cent),  5 
for  six  (0.5  per  cent),  2  for  four  (0.2  per  cent),  and  127  men  (13.3  per  cent)  had  signed  on  for  three 
years.  See  Muster  Rolls  of  the  45th  Regiment,  April  1757,  LO6987/76. 

110  Steppler,  "The  Common  Soldier  in  the  Reign  of  George  III",  pp.  95-105. 

111  Anderson,  A  People's  Army,  pp.  38-39. 

112  Titus,  Old  Dominion  at  War,  pp.  4-45, 163  n.  87;  Robert  Dinwiddie  to  Loudoun,  24  May  1756, 
LO1175/26. 


328 


PETER  WAY 


every  ten  soldiers  an  "American"  recruit  (Table  10.1).113  In  recruiting  such 
numbers,  the  British  Army  did  not  merely  target  the  marginal  but  reached 
into  the  heart  of  colonial  production.  In  a  sample  of  sixty-six  regular  recruits 
mostly  from  the  Boston  area,  forty-one  (62.1  per  cent)  came  from  artisanal 
backgrounds  (with  shoemakers  and  tailors  being  most  represented),  eleven 
(16.7  per  cent)  came  from  agriculture,  eleven  (16.7  per  cent)  had  performed 
manual  labor,  and  three  (4.5  per  cent)  clerical  or  professional  work.114 

An  account  of  recruiting  in  America  clearly  reveals  the  army's  impact  on 
colonial  economies.  Great  differences  existed  between  regions,  most  strik- 
ingly between  north  and  south  because  of  the  latter's  growing  dependence  on 
slavery.  But  in  the  mid-Atlantic  region  and  New  England,  the  two  main  areas 
of  recruitment  for  the  army,  petty  production  based  upon  the  household  in 
the  agricultural  and  the  craft  sectors,  proved  the  norm,  with  familial  labor 
playing  an  important  role  and,  particularly  in  the  mid-Atlantic,  bonded 
labor  making  significant  contributions.115  At  the  same  time,  labor  scarcity 
prevailed  throughout  the  colonies.  Military  recruitment  exacerbated  this 
situation  and  this  clash  between  household  production  and  state-sponsored 
enterprise  on  an  Atlantic  scale  partly  explains  the  fractious  experience 
of  mobilization.  Its  effect  on  indentured  servitude  figured  centrally.  First 
without  any  explicit  policy,  then  with  the  backing  of  a  British  parliamentary 
act,  the  army  "freed"  many  servants  from  bondage  and  introduced  them 
to  paid  military  labor.  Although  it  promised  reimbursement  for  the  loss  of 
contract  time,  cash  could  not  immediately  replace  scarce  labor.  Likewise, 
the  recruiting  of  free  men  hit  farm  and  craft  households,  where  the  young 
men  targeted  by  the  army  performed  important  labor  as  family  members, 
apprentices  or  journeymen,  and  servants.  Their  call  to  arms  produced  cries 
of  concern  as  it  meant  a  loss  of  labor,  one  reason  why  colonials  looked  more 
favorably  upon  enlistment  to  the  provincial  regiments,  given  the  annual 
term  of  service  and  the  fact  that  money  earned  tended  to  be  expended 
locally.  To  the  extent  that  the  regular  army  (with  the  government's  backing) 
facilitated  the  recruitment  of  such  men  and  their  abstraction  from  family 
and  village  for  longer  periods,  it  had  a  direct  impact  on  domestic  economies. 

113  Stanley  Pargellis  estimated  that  7,500  colonials  enlisted  in  the  British  army  in  1755-1757;  Dan 
Higgonbotham,  11,000  during  the  war  as  a  whole.  See  Pargellis,  Lord  Loudoun  in  NorthAmerica, 
pp.  108-109;  Higgonbotham,  "The  Early  American  Way  of  War",  p.  235. 

114  For  a  full  presentation  of  this  data,  see  Way,  "Rebellion  of  the  Regulars",  pp.  768-769. 

115  A  voluminous  literature  exists  on  the  colonial  economy.  See,  for  example,  Henretta, 
"Families  and  Farms";  Salinger,  "To  Serve  Well  and  Faithfully";  Kulikoff  The  Agrarian  Origins 
of  American  Capitalism;  Schultz,  Republic  of  Labor;  Vickers,  Farmers  and  Fishermen;  Kulikoff, 
From  British  Peasants  to  Colonial  American  Farmers. 


"THE  SCUM  OF  EVERY  COUNTY,  THE  REFUSE  OF  MANKIND" 


329 


British  demands  for  support  thus  met  with  American  recalcitrance  and 
outright  resistance  to  the  effort  to  mobilize  manpower  in  the  Seven  Years 
War.  In  the  process  of  a  massive  mutual  enterprise,  feelings  of  difference 
sharpened,  acquiring  an  edge  that  the  infusion  of  funds  from  the  British 
fiscal-military  state  and  the  shared  military  success  of  the  later  war  years 
blunted,  but  the  blade  had  been  tempered  and  needed  only  another  imperial 
crisis  to  whet  the  distinction  between  Briton  and  American. 

Conclusion 

Warfare  in  the  eighteenth  century  operated  according  to  the  principles  of  the 
military  revolution,  the  basic  premise  of  which  hinged  on  bringing  as  many 
men  as  possible  onto  the  battlefield.  For  every  nation-state,  mobilization 
occurred  within  a  particular  political  economy  at  a  particular  moment  in 
history.  In  the  era  of  the  Seven  Years  War,  a  rapidly  commercializing  economy 
spread  across  British  dominions  and  created  a  surplus  of  labor  that  facilitated 
raising  the  army.  England's  control  of  other  political  states,  achieved  through 
successive  colonization  of  Ireland  and  union  with  Scotland,  cemented  by  the 
repression  of  the  Jacobite  threat,  enabled  the  expropriation  of  their  wealth  to 
fund  military  endeavors  and  the  exploitation  of  their  populations  as  sources 
of  military  labor,  while  commercialization  of  their  economies  along  English 
lines  freed  individuals  from  ties  to  the  soil  and  trades.  The  attempt  to  exer- 
cise similar  force  in  the  American  colonies,  where  labor  scarcity  prevailed, 
encountered  more  resistance  from  people  less  used  to  the  yoke  of  British 
rule,  whose  economic  activities  relied  upon  the  control  of  labor  that  could  be 
sorely  spared  for  soldiering.  However,  the  financial  might  of  Britain  bought 
American  compliance,  particularly  in  the  funding  of  the  provincial  regi- 
ments, and  colonists  in  the  tens  of  thousands  joined  the  fight  against  France 
either  as  regulars  or  colonial  troops.  Warfare  for  Britain  thus  required  not  a 
simple  conjoining  of  state  interest  and  military  acumen,  but  rested  upon  the 
historical  development  of  capital  and  ongoing  class  formation,  enabling  the 
fiscal-military  state  to  colonize  the  resources  and  labor  power  of  dependent 
polities.  As  a  result,  the  nation  could  rely  on  volunteers  to  practice  the  art  of 
war  in  its  interests. 


Mobilization  of  warrior  populations  in 
the  Ottoman  context,  1750-1850 

Virginia  H.  Aksan 


Mustafa  Vasfi  Efendi  of  Kabud,  a  native  of  a  village  near  Tokat,  in  Anatolia, 
Turkey,  spent  the  years  from  1801  to  1833  in  Ottoman  military  service, 
first  in  Erzurum,  as  part  of  the  troops  under  Dramali  Mahmud  Pasha, 
then  in  Agriboz  (Euboia,  Greece),  where  he  signed  on  with  Carhaci  (Chief 
Skirmisher)  Ali  Pasha,  and  then  Omer  Vyroni  Pasha,  during  the  Greek 
Revolution.  His  simplistic,  semi-literate  description  of  battles,  sieges, 
looting,  and  pillaging  is  one  of  the  few  pre-World  War  I  Ottoman  military 
memoirs  we  possess.  The  following  passage  is  typical  of  the  work,  and  is 
evocative  of  the  life  of  one  Ottoman  irregular.  Vasfi  Efendi's  escapade  here 
appears  to  have  been  a  private  enterprise,  and  evoked  no  discipline  other 
than  a  scolding  from  his  commander. 

"The  Janissaries,  because  they  were  on  foot,  soon  fell  behind",  he  begins. 
"We,  who  had  good  horses,  went  on  ahead.  We  were  altogether  eighteen 
horsemen.  Anyway,  we  went  off  and  arrived  in  an  infidel  village."  They 
sat  down  under  two  mulberry  trees,  whereupon  some  local  inhabitants 
approached  them,  and  said:  "We  are  afraid  of  you.  We  have  wives  and 
daughters  on  that  mountain  over  there.  If  you  give  us  protection,  we  will 
come  down.  We  said:  'the  pasha  has  sent  us  and  we  have  orders  to  protect 
you.'  The  infidels  were  extremely  glad,  went  away  and  brought  lamb  and 
bread  to  us.  About  twenty  to  thirty  women  and  girls  came  with  them." 
The  cavalrymen  grew  afraid  of  being  outnumbered,  and  isolated  for  the 
night,  when  they  assumed  the  infidels  would  slay  them,  so  "[we]  took  the 
infidels,  cut  off  their  heads,  captured  these  thirty  women  and  girls,  and  took 
off."  They  came  upon  a  church,  captured  the  infidels  who  were  inside  the 
church,  cut  off  their  heads  and  hid  in  the  church  for  the  night.  They  found 
5,000  sheep  beside  the  church  the  next  day,  and  with  sheep  and  captives, 
returned  towards  their  camp.  On  the  way  back,  an  encounter  with  a  troop 
of  janissaries  resulted  in  their  losing  captives  and  booty  at  gunpoint.  "I  had 
a  girl  and  woman  with  me,  and  two  mules.  They  [the  janissaries]  arrived, 
plundered  all  my  possessions.  I  remained  behind  as  a  simple  foot  soldier." 
Then,  running  into  other  janissaries,  Vasfi  pretended  to  be  of  their  number 
and  complained  of  his  treatment  by  his  comrades.  A  Kurdish  servant  of 
the  janissaries  addressed  those  who  had  abused  him:  "you  have  taken  this 


332 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


man's  possessions,  slave  girls,  and  severed  infidels'  heads.  Things  like  this 
do  not  befit  our  corps.  Now  give  this  man  his  belongings."  Vasfi  Efendi  thus 
retrieved  his  booty,  and  returned  to  camp.  His  commander  rewarded  him 
with  two  coins  for  the  heads,  but  chastised  him  that  the  deli  horsemen 
(his  regiment  presumably)  had  no  business  advancing  ahead  of  the  main 
army  corps.1 

What  was  it  to  be  employed  as  a  hired  gun,  either  enlisted  irregular 
or  mercenary,  in  the  Ottoman  military  system?  Embedded  in  Mustafa's 
description  is  the  problem  that  confronts  us  when  we  try  to  examine 
military  labor  in  the  Ottoman  context.  Inter-service  rivalries,  motivation, 
loyalty,  and  discipline  -  common  problems  for  historians  of  all  armies  -  are 
all  evident  in  his  account,  which  is  predominantly  a  tale  about  military 
entrepreneurship.  Over  the  long  history  of  the  empire,  words  such  as 
deli,  ba§ibozuk,  sekban,  sarica,  and  levend,  terms  for  bands  of  warriors,  or 
semi-autonomous  regiments,  unpredictable  and  often  lethal,  have  come 
to  exemplify  the  breakdown  of  the  Ottoman  "classical"  military  after  1650. 
In  the  nineteenth  century,  the  notorious  ba§ibozuks  (literally  "broken- 
headed"  or  "masterless"  ones),  Ottoman  irregulars,  were  blamed  for  almost 
all  disturbances,  but  especially  the  so-called  Bulgarian  atrocities  which  led 
to  the  Russo-Ottoman  War  of  1877-1878.  The  extent  to  which  the  images  of 
such  irregulars  are  embedded  in  the  public  imagination  of  post-Ottoman 
national  histories  is  one  of  the  chief  differences  between  the  Ottomans  and 
the  other  regions  of  our  collaborative  project. 

This  chapter  will  explore  the  ways  in  which  the  Ottomans  conceptualized 
and  utilized  volunteer  and  contractual  soldiers  over  time,  especially  for  the 
period  1750-1850;  I  argue  that,  during  one  of  the  most  difficult  periods  for  the 
survival  of  the  empire,  the  Ottomans  evolved  from  a  largely  commissioned 
state  army  (the  janissaries  and  the  timariots)  into  a  federative  military 
system  that  came  to  be  dominated  by  semi-autonomous  fighters,  first  as 
auxiliaries  to  the  traditional  janissary/sipahi  organization  and  then  as 
entrepreneurial  ethnic  bands.  This  is  John  Lynn's  "aggregate  contract  army", 
consisting  of  small  numbers  of  state  troops,  mercenary  bands,  and  private 
armies  raised  by  provincial  elites.  Local  officials,  in  effect,  had  become 
military  contractors,  a  system  which  empowered  provincial  households 
and  sanctioned  the  perpetuation  of  a  style  and  ethos  of  military  life  that 

1  Schmidt,  "The  Adventure  of  an  Ottoman  Horseman:  the  Autobiography  of  Kabudli  Vasfi 
Efendi,  1800-1825",  in  Jan  Schmidt,  The  Joys  of  Philology:  Studies  in  Ottoman  Literature,  History 
and  Orientalism  (1500-1923)  (Istanbul,  2002),  I,  pp.  284-285,  quoted  in  Aksan,  Ottoman  Wars 
7700-1870,  p.  298. 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850  333 

persisted  into  the  twentieth  century.  In  what  follows,  I  will  schematize  the 
kind  of  forces  available  to  the  sultans  before  1700  and  how  they  financed 
the  system  before  turning  to  the  changes  evident  after  1750  when  the  need 
for  manpower  became  particularly  acute  in  the  northern  frontier  wars  with 
the  Russians.  As  the  classical  Ottoman  military  formations  broke  down,  a 
large  proportion  of  the  Ottoman  population  became  complicit  in  and  tied 
to  the  Ottoman  center  through  tax  privileges  and  contractual  obligations 
to  supply  the  battlefields  of  the  empire. 

Aspects  of  the  pre-1700  Ottoman  system 

Prior  to  1700,  the  Ottoman  military  system  was  based  on  three  components: 
the  janissary  standing  infantry,  created  in  the  fourteenth  century  and 
numbering  some  20,000  in  Siileyman  the  Magnificent's  time  (1520-1566); 
the  fief-based  timariots,  the  sipahis,  a  cavalry  class  which  could  muster 
some  80,000  for  imperial  campaigns;  and  auxiliary  troops  raised  locally, 
with  well-defined  roles  in  skirmishing,  guarding  mountain  passes,  and 
garrison  support  for  the  Ottoman  expansion,  especially  on  the  European 
frontier.2  The  Ottoman  strategy  with  newly  conquered  populations  was 
to  negotiate  tax  benefits  based  on  the  potential  of  local  martial  expertise 
and  intelligence.3 

The  Ottoman  Empire  maintained  such  center/periphery  relationships 
as  a  contractual,  negotiated  enterprise  until  the  1830s,  a  system  which 
proved  flexible  as  it  accumulated  new  territories.  While  coercive  in  initial 
conquest,  the  extension  of  Ottoman  power  proved  highly  adaptive  to  widely 
diverse  local  situations,  and  attempted  no  real  integration  except  as  related 
to  shari'a  law  and  taxes.  Using  local  systems  of  defense  and  awarding  tax 
breaks  were  attractive  instruments  to  frontier  populations  initially  and,  in 
the  early  days  of  empire,  Christian  as  well  as  Muslim  auxiliaries  acquired 

2  The  most  recent  assessments  of  the  pre-1700  Ottoman  military  are  by  Agoston,  "Empires 
and  Warfare  in  East-Central  Europe",  and  Murphey,  "Ottoman  Military  Organisation  in  South- 
Eastern  Europe". 

3  Palmira  Brummett,  Nicholas  Vatin,  Gilles  Veinstein,  Hasan  Karateke  and  Maurus  Reinkowski 
have  expanded  our  knowledge  of  Ottoman  dynastic  self-conception  and  projection  as  well,  but 
there  is  much  to  do  to  put  the  Ottoman  house  in  a  comparative  context  as  regards  sovereignty, 
imperial  designs,  and  military  manpower.  A  recent  work  goes  a  long  way  to  bridging  the  gap: 
Burbank  and  Cooper,  Empires  in  World  History.  Birdal,  The  Holy  Roman  Empire  and  the  Ottomans, 
is  an  example  of  new  work  on  the  eastern  land  empires.  Also  important  are  Brummett,  "Imagin- 
ing the  Early  Modern  Ottoman  Space";  Vatin  and  Veinstein,  Le  serail  ebranle;  and  Karateke  and 
Reinkowski,  Legitimizing  the  Order. 


334 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


privileges  based  on  their  service  in  the  military  system.  As  time  went  by, 
"turning  Turk"  (becoming  Muslim  by  conversion)  was  the  route  to  power, 
whether  you  were  Albanian,  Bulgarian,  or  Serbian.  Even  then,  apart  from 
the  dev§irme,  the  slave  tributary  children  destined  for  the  janissaries,  such 
conversions  were  largely  voluntary.4 

What  motivated  such  populations?  For  the  earlier  centuries,  the  ghazi 
warrior,  that  is,  the  Muslim  warrior  whose  motivation  was  solely  ideological, 
was  long  argued  as  instrumental  to  the  success  of  the  Ottoman  imperial 
drive  for  expansion  of  the  Dar-al-Islam.  Though  challenged  by  new  com- 
prehensive views  on  the  diversity  of  the  ethnic  and  religious  populations 
who  collaborated  with  the  house  of  Osman  in  the  early  years,  the  idea  of 
the  fanatical  Muslim  warrior  remains  prevalent  in  much  of  the  literature.5 
The  argument  is  made  that  the  primary  Ottoman  social  hierarchies  and  tax 
categories  before  1750  were  delineated  around  religion:  Muslims  and  non- 
Muslims.  Non-Muslims  were  tolerated  as  second-class  citizens  who  paid 
a  poll  tax  {cizye)  and  were  not  allowed  to  serve  in  the  military.  The  askeri 
(military)  class,  those  who  did  fight  and  achieved  tax-exempt  status,  were 
nominally  Muslim  warrior  populations.  But  it  would  be  naive  to  insist  on 
the  Muslimness  of  men  who  surely  were  motivated  by  the  same  self-interest 
and  social  networks  characteristic  of  all  military  environments.  Self-interest 
is  especially  evident  in  the  eighteenth  century  when  the  state  came  to  rely 
more  and  more  on  irregular  troops  under  the  command  of  local  provincial 
elites.  Campaign  headquarters  on  the  European  and  Persian  frontiers  cer- 
tainly operated  as  the  Ottoman  government-on-parade,  and  employment 
in  the  military  was  naturally  a  ritual  of  submission,  an  essential  part  of 
the  Ottoman  performance  of  sovereignty,  but  cash  rewards,  as  indicated 
in  Mustafa's  story,  remained  a  constant  incentive  for  participation  in  the 
Ottoman  system  until  at  least  the  1820s. 

In  short,  auxiliary  or  mobile  warriors,  Muslim  and  Christian,  did  have 
a  fair  amount  of  autonomy  over  their  participation  in  imperial  campaigns 
or  postings  at  strategic  fortress  garrisons.  Until  the  end  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  purging  of  the  Ottoman  forces  of  "infidels"  was  not  part  of  Ottoman 
policy.  That  is  to  say,  little  systematic  inspection  about  the  "Muslimness"  of 

4  This  remains  a  much  contested  subject  in  the  field.  On  conversion  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  see  Krstic,  Contested  Conversions  to  Islam;  David  and  Fodor,  Ransom  Slavery  along  the 
Ottoman  Borders;  Anscombe,  "Albanians  and  Mountain  Bandits";  Baer,  Honored  by  the  Glory  of 
Islam;  and  Minkov,  Conversion  to  Islam  in  the  Balkans. 

5  Finkel,  Osman's  Dream;  Imber,  The  Ottoman  Empire,  1300-1650,  2nd  edn;  Barkey,  Empire  of 
Difference.  See  also  Aksan,  "Locating  the  Ottomans  among  Early  Modern  Empires".  For  an  as- 
sessment of  Barkey's  book  and  two  others,  see  Aksan,  "Turks  and  Ottomans  among  the  Empires". 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850  335 

the  Ottoman  rank-and-file  troops,  whether  in  the  janissaries,  sipahi  cavalry 
troops  or  the  myriad  auxiliaries,  seems  to  have  occurred.  Declaring  oneself 
Muslim  often  sufficed  for  certification  and  a  piece  of  paper,  such  as  the 
janissary  esame  (pay  chit),  or  the  six-month  contract  as  part  of  a  mercenary 
unit,  guaranteed  an  attachment  to  the  dynasty.  This  was  particularly 
true  of  the  provincial  garrisons,  where  a  web  of  military  entrepreneurial 
networks  coalesced  around  tax  revenues  and  agriculture  beginning  in  the 
mid-seventeenth  century,  which  would  have  attracted  local  inhabitants  in 
considerable  numbers. 

Call  it  Ottoman  pragmatism  or  Ottoman  secularism,  there  seems  to  have 
been  a  tolerance  for  notional  Muslimness  in  these  military  milieus.  Con- 
versely, one  of  the  great  ironies  of  the  Ottoman  dynasty  is  that  it  expressed 
itself  as  most  "Muslim"  after  the  1820s,  precisely  when  shrinking  territories 
made  manpower  shortages  a  potential  problem,  and  put  pressure  on  central 
Anatolia  Muslim  male  populations.  For  the  Ottomans,  the  need  to  mobilize 
volunteer  warriors  became  paramount  when  empire-wide  conscription 
or  general  mobilization  was  attempted  in  the  nineteenth  century,  but  the 
resistance  to  including  Christians  restricted  the  available  population  to 
Muslims,  and  the  call  to  holy  war  (Jihad)  seldom  produced  substantial 
numbers.6 

The  post-1700  environment 

After  1700,  the  main  obsession  of  the  dynasty  was  the  preservation  of  the 
Danubian,  Black  Sea,  and  Caucasus  borders  against  the  predations  of  the 
Russians,  their  chief  and  relentlessly  successful  foe.  The  need  to  defend  the 
borders,  which  became  a  matter  of  survival,  engendered  different  relation- 
ships between  the  center  and  its  warrior  populations,  two  aspects  of  which 
are  noteworthy:  the  mobility  and  utilization  of  diverse  ethno-religious 
nomadic  and  warrior  populations,  and  the  expansion  of  the  askeri  (military) 
population  via  the  redistribution  of  the  wealth  of  the  state.  What  is  striking 
in  this  context,  as  compared  to  European  armies  of  this  later  period,  is 
the  proportion  of  horsemen  (cavalry)  that  continued  to  be  available  to 
the  dynasty,  either  in  state-financed  auxiliary  regiments,  or  as  ethnically 
constructed  warrior  bands,  as  contrasted  to  the  European  battlefields  where 

6  Hakan  Erdem  is  very  good  on  this:  "Recruitment  of 'Victorious  Soldiers  of  Muhammad'". 
The  year  1908  was  the  first  time  there  was  a  mobilization  of  "citizens"  regardless  of  religion  or 
ethnicity.  See  also  Aksan,  "Ottoman  Military  and  Social  Transformations". 


336 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


warfare  turned  to  armed  confrontations  of  large  numbers  of  disciplined 
infantrymen,  and  cavalry  forces  served  very  specific,  increasingly  limited 
functions.  The  obsession  with  the  northern  frontier  battlefront  arc  also  led 
in  the  Ottoman  case  to  a  neglect  of  the  southern  tier  of  the  empire  which 
allowed  for  the  expansion  of  nomadic  and  mobile  populations,  such  as  the 
Bedouin  and  Kurdish  tribes,  who  maintained  autonomy  by  their  original 
submission  to  Ottoman  hegemony  and  payment  of  annual  tributes  to  the 
central  treasury. 

Resat  Kasaba  has  recently  theorized  that  the  persistence  of  mobile  popu- 
lations was  facilitated  by  the  important  roles  they  played,  such  as  protecting 
the  Hajj  route  caravans,  and  defending  the  Iranian  border  against  Nadir 
Shah  in  the  early  eighteenth  century.  The  failure  to  impose  sedentarization 
on  such  tribal  structures,  however,  ultimately  caused  the  dynasty  end- 
less problems  in  the  nineteenth  century,  especially  in  forging  a  modern, 
conscripted,  and  disciplined  military  force  from  such  populations.7 

By  contrast,  in  both  the  Austrian  and  Russian  contexts,  fixing  the 
frontiers  included  efforts  to  settle  what  had  once  been  zones  of  economic 
and  cultural  exchange  where  warrior  societies  dominated.  As  the  work 
of  Gunther  E.  Rothenberg  and  Carol  B.  Stevens  has  demonstrated,  both 
Habsburgs  and  Romanovs  strove  to  settle  autonomous  warrior  populations, 
the  former  using  Serbs  and  Croats  for  a  military  corridor,  the  latter  engaging 
to  tame  frontier  populations  such  as  the  Cossacks  by  establishing  military 
colonies  guarding  the  Russian  territorial  expansion  to  the  south.8  The 
Ottomans  faced  a  different  problem.  As  the  Ottoman  Empire  contracted 
after  1700,  demobilized  soldiers  flooded  across  newly  agreed-upon  borders, 
and  not  all  were  absorbed,  or  could  be  absorbed,  into  the  military  environ- 
ment. It  is  not  insignificant  that  all  the  Habsburg-Ottoman  treaties  from 
1699  on  have  specific  clauses  relating  to  how  the  two  sides  ought  to  deal 
with  frontier-transgressing  soldiers.9  The  failure  to  settle  demobilized 
populations  such  as  the  janissaries  crossing  into  the  homeland  from  Europe 
after  1700  is  very  significant,  and  virtually  untouched  in  the  research,  the 
exception  perhaps  being  Vidin,  where  Rossitsa  Gradeva  and  her  colleagues 
have  ably  described  a  city  that  shifted  from  being  Ottoman  hinterland  to 

7  Kasaba,  A  Moveable  Empire;  Aharoni,  The  Pasha's  Bedouin,  has  interesting  observations 
about  the  contrast  between  Ottoman  (Mehmed  Ali)  and  French  attitudes  to  Bedouin  tribesmen. 

8  Rothenberg,  The  Military  Border  in  Croatia;  Stevens,  Soldiers  on  the  Steppes;  see  also  Stevens, 
Russia's  Wars  of  Emergence. 

9  Smiley,  "The  Rules  of  War  on  the  Ottoman  Frontiers";  Aksan,  "Whose  Territory  and  Whose 
Peasants?" 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850 


337 


Ottoman  frontier  garrison  town  after  1699. 10  Thus,  the  Ottomans  had  both 
indigenous  nomadic  populations  and  unemployed,  demobilized  soldiers  to 
contend  with  as  they  undertook  to  reform  the  military  system. 

The  Ottomans  attempted  to  change  the  rules  regarding  tribal/state  rela- 
tionships as  the  need  for  the  manpower  and  revenues  of  Arab  and  Kurdish 
tribesmen  became  acute,  especially  in  the  long  struggle  with  Mehmed  Ali 
Pasha  of  Egypt  over  greater  Syria  from  1821  to  1841.  Historians  now  generally 
allow  that  it  is  only  then,  when  the  Ottomans  were  trying  to  recover  or 
integrate  lost  or  tenuously  held  territories  such  as  the  mountainous  frontiers 
of  Albania  or  the  Caucasus  for  the  first  time,  that  they  can  be  said  to  have 
acted  as  an  internal  colonial  power  by  civilizing  such  martial  populations. 
The  power  of  the  tribal  networks,  paradoxically,  is  said  to  have  expanded 
in  direct  proportion  to  the  state's  interest  in  centralization  and  reform.11 
Stefan  Winter's  project  on  the  rural  history  of  Ottoman  Syria  in  the  nine- 
teenth century  is  particularly  instructive  about  the  Ottoman  application  of 
ethnographic  labels  to  hitherto  undifferentiated  tribal  groups  as  one  aspect 
of  Ottoman  (re)  centralization  projects.  These  were  the  populations,  not  just 
Kurds  and  Bedouins,  but  also  Albanians  and  Circassians,  who  remained 
fiercely  martial  and  proudly  autonomous  until  the  early  1900s,  upon  whom 
the  Ottoman  dynasty  came  to  rely  for  military  labour.12 

The  expansion  of  the  military  population 

How  do  we  define  an  Ottoman  subject  of  the  askeri  class  at  the  turn  of 
the  eighteenth  century?  Recent,  systematic  work  on  the  Ottoman  idea  of 
political  households  and  the  devolution  of  state  wealth  as  tax  farms  has  had 

10  Gradeva,  "Between  Hinterland  and  Frontier".  Geza  David  and  Pal  Fodor  have  also  edited  two 
volumes  on  Hungarian- Ottoman  military  aifairs-.Hungarian-Ottoman  Military  and  Diplomatic 
Relations  in  the  Age  of  Suleyman  the  Magnificent  and  Ottomans,  Hungarians  and  Habsburgs 
in  Central  Europe.  A  recent  dissertation,  by  Tolga  Esmer,  "A  Culture  of  Rebellion",  includes 
significant  evidence  concerning  the  breakdown  of  askeri-reaya  categories  following  1699,  and 
especially  in  the  long  struggle  between  Selim  III  and  Osman  Pasvantoglu  ofVidin. 

11  Kasaba,  A  Moveable  Empire,  es  pecially  ch.  4. 

12  Makdisi,  "Ottoman  Orientalism",  discusses  why  the  Ottomans  should  be  seen  as  a  colonial 
power  in  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century;  Winter,  "The  Province  of  Raqqa  under 
Ottoman  Rule",  forms  part  of  an  extended  project  underway:  "Tribes  and  Voivodes  of  Ottoman 
Syria:  A  Rural  History  of  the  Early  Modern  Period".  See  also  Kiihn,  "Borderlands  of  the  Ottoman 
Empire  in  the  19th  and  Early  20th  Century",  with  articles  by  Thomas  Kiihn,  Isa  Blumi,  Ryan 
Gingeras  and  Charles  Herzog.  For  the  Yemen  context,  a  late  Ottoman  colonial  frontier,  see 
Willis,  "Making  Yemen  Indian". 


338 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


a  great  deal  to  tell  us.13  Tributary,  clientage,  and  patronage  relationships 
were  essential  to  the  initial  conquests  of  Ottoman  territories  as  well  as  to  its 
later  survival.  In  the  seventeenth  century,  we  see  the  expansion  of  elaborate 
and  expensive  household  systems  which  often  included  military  units  that 
drew  on  the  mercenary  populations  in  the  provinces.  Such  relationships, 
conceptualized  as  political  households,  were  built  on  the  ability  to  com- 
mand coalitions  of  soldiers  and  slaves,  led  by  charismatic  families  who 
acquired  or  wrested  access  to  larger  and  larger  parts  of  provincial  revenues, 
and  maintained  networks  of  communication  and  influence  in  Istanbul 
as  time  went  on.  That  the  source  of  much  of  this  manpower  derived  from 
captured  slaves  turned  valued  members  of  an  extended  family  may  be  the 
unique  aspect  of  the  Ottoman  context. 

The  greatest  of  the  slave/political  households  was  initially  that  of  the 
sultan  and  his  "sons",  the  janissaries,  and  his  harem.  Emulating  that 
household  at  the  Ottoman  center  were  "native"  families  of  influence, 
organized  similarly,  and  competing  for  the  ranks  of  the  ulema  and  the 
central  administrative  offices.  These  could  be  made  up  of  slaves  (kuls)  who 
might  even  establish  their  own  slave  household.  Such  was  the  household 
of  Husrev  Pasha,  the  notorious  adviser  of  Mahmud  II,  whose  Circassian 
slave  household  populated  much  of  the  late  nineteenth-century  Ottoman 
administration.14  All  members  of  the  ruling  class  derived  some  privilege  via 
membership  in  these  collectives,  the  askeri  class  largely  writ,  which  meant 
an  intensification  of  competition  for  access  to  the  resources  of  the  state. 

Such  political  households,  replicated  on  a  smaller  scale  in  the  provinces, 
and  including  slave /client  members,  grew  ubiquitous  after  the  early  seven- 
teenth century.  How  this  happened  is  just  now  unfolding  as  more  and  more 
regional  archival  studies  are  published.  The  redistribution  of  state  revenues, 
from  timars  to  tax  farming,  first  annual  and  then  life-term  (maLikane),  as 
well  as  the  widespread  application  of  new,  extraordinary  taxes  (avariz) 
to  support  lengthy  military  campaigns,  empowered  the  growth  of  such 
local  households  who  maintained  representatives  in  Istanbul  guarding 
the  interests  of  the  particular  household.  This  trend  most  represents  a 
similar  devolution  of  state  wealth  in  Bourbon  France  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  as  exemplified  by  the  military  fiscalism  of  the  centralizing  state, 

13  The  most  recent  summary  of  the  status  of  the  research  in  Faroqhi,  The  Cambridge  History 
of  Turkey,  III,  The  Later  Ottoman  Empire,  7603-7S39,  with  articles  by  Bruce  Masters,  Christoph 
Neumann,  Virginia  Aksan,  Carter  Findley,  Dina  Khoury,  and  Fikret  Adanir  on  the  subject  of 
political  households  and  Ottomanization. 

14  See  especially  C.A.  Bayly's  introductory  article,  "Distorted  Development",  in  a  volume  of 
comparative  essays. 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850  339 

and  the  creation  of  a  class  of  provincial  officials  known  as  the  intendants. 
In  the  Ottoman  case,  the  beneficiaries  of  the  new  system  appear  to  have 
been  the  janissaries.  In  other  words,  the  sultans  were  forced  to  redistribute 
the  right  to  collect  the  tax  revenues  of  the  empire  in  order  to  procure  the 
large  armies  necessitated  by  the  battlefields  of  the  late  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries. 

To  what  extent  this  development  accelerated  the  integration  of  the  janis- 
sary corps  into  provincial  elites  and/or  caused  the  collapse  of  the  sipahi  class 
as  a  source  of  battle-ready  manpower  is  still  a  question  for  debate.15  What 
is  clear  is  that  the  eclipse  of  the  sipahi  class  and  the  simultaneous  loss  of 
control  over  the  size  and  discipline  of  the  janissary  forces  diminished  the 
Ottoman  central  capacity  to  organize  warfare  effectively.  This  required  the 
introduction  of  other  methods  of  raising  manpower,  which  led  gradually 
to  the  increased  use  of  ethnically/regionally  based  autonomous  bands  as 
described  above.  Their  loyalties  lay  with  their  patrons,  their  households, 
and  their  ethnic  brotherhoods,  but  the  source  of  their  wealth  ultimately 
remained  tied  to  the  continuation  of  the  dynasty.  Hence,  many  authors  now 
refer  to  this  period  as  the  Ottomanization  of  the  provinces,  or  the  creation 
of  the  Ottoman-local  class,  or  even  as  the  reaya-ization  of  the  janissaries. 
As  Hiilya  Canbakal  notes  regarding  the  Ottoman  seventeenth-century 
resemblance  to  European  trends  of  the  period:  "modern  state-formation 
now  appears  to  have  involved  successive  stages  of  centralism  and  provincial 
accommodation  that  resulted  in  the  rejuvenation  of  the  ruling  class  and 
allowed  the  state  to  capitalize  on  wider  economic  and  political  resources". 
She  adds,  "In  the  Ottoman  case,  the  acquisition  of  stipends,  posts  and  tax 
farming  contracts  also  made  one  an  'askeri,  as  did  claiming  descent  from 
the  prophet  Muhammad  or  entering  a  military  corps.  In  other  words,  one 
dimension  of  the  process  characterized  as  Ottomanization  overlapped  with 
a  formal  transformation:  the  expansion  of  the  'askeri."16 

Canbakal's  askeri  class,  defined  according  to  a  survey  of  1697,  but  rooted  in 
long-time  practice,  included  all  those  on  stipends  (preachers,  prayer-leaders, 
scribes,  trustees  of  charitable  organizations,  tax  collectors  and  overseers, 
inhabitants  of  dervish  convents,  Quran  reciters,  and  the  like);  semiprofes- 
sional  auxiliary  troops;  descendants  of  the  Prophet;  those  providing  special 
services  such  as  falcon-raisers,  mountain  pass  guards,  bridge-keepers,  mes- 
sengers, share-croppers  on  state  land,  rice  cultivators,  sheep  producers, 

15  As  ably  argued  by  Agoston,  "Military  Transformation  in  the  Ottoman  Empire  and  Russia". 

16  Canbakal,  Society  and  Politics  in  an  Ottoman  Town,  pp.  62-63;  Toledano,  "The  Emergence  of 
Ottoman-Local  Elites";  Raduschev,  "'Peasant' Janissaries?" 


340 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


sheep  and  cattle  dealers,  copper  miners,  deputy  judges,  and  city  wardens; 
and  finally,  janissaries  and  sipahis,  that  is,  some  1,053  members  or  36  per 
cent  of  all  the  households.17  The  list  reminds  us  of  two  things:  that  the  askeri 
class  was  made  up  of  far  more  than  just  "soldiers",  and  that  the  competition 
for  certification  by  the  center,  which  in  some  cases  required  reapplication 
on  an  annual  basis,  must  have  been  intense,  necessitating  the  spidery  webs 
of  households  and  patronage  connections  described  by  Barkey. 

What  had  happened  to  the  financial  status  of  the  soldiers  in  the  survey 
to  move  them  to  compete  for  local  revenues  as  described?  In  brief,  the 
timariot/sipahi  cavalryman,  the  original  free  Turkic  warrior  who  was 
essential  to  the  success  of  the  Ottoman  dynasty,  was  rewarded  by  the  as- 
signment of  noninheritable  grants  of  land  (dirliks)  to  support  the  soldier 
and  his  entourage  on  campaign.  By  the  mid-seventeenth  century,  the  yields/ 
tax  returns  on  such  assignments  no  longer  sufficed  to  entice  the  sipahis 
away  from  their  holdings  to  go  on  campaign,  unless  it  was  to  preserve  the 
holdings  themselves,  by  responding  to  the  command  either  to  turn  up  at  the 
battlefront  or  lose  their  entitlement.  Their  numbers  averaged  50,000-80,000 
depending  on  the  size  of  the  campaign  throughout  most  of  the  seventeenth 
and  early  eighteenth  centuries,  but  clearly  were  on  the  decline.  By  1768,  the 
number  of  sipahis  had  become  insignificant  in  contrast  to  the  numbers 
of  temporarily  hired  troops,  called  levends,  who  were  mobilized  by  local 
provincial  families  or  officials  with  central  treasury  funds.  Orders  for  the 
mobilization  of  as  many  as  80,000  such  troops  were  sent  to  provincial  of- 
ficials for  the  campaign  on  the  Danube  in  1769.  Ahmed  Resmi  Efendi,  on 
the  battlefront  at  that  campaign,  noted  that  only  a  few  old  men  claiming 
to  be  timariots  appeared,  and  that  the  janissaries  were  demanding  they  be 
assigned  a  timar  before  they  would  fight,  yet  more  evidence  of  the  competi- 
tion over  local  resources.18 

The  janissary  infantry  system  had  emerged  in  the  fourteenth  century 
as  a  strategy  aimed  at  creating  a  force  totally  dedicated  to  the  security  and 
perpetuation  of  the  Ottoman  house,  in  contrast  to  the  voluntary  commit- 
ment of  the  sipahi  cavalry.  The  janissaries  added  formidable  matchlock/ 
flintlock  firepower  to  the  Ottoman  arsenal.  The  effectiveness  of  both  the 
infantry  and  cavalry  systems,  however,  diminished  precipitously  after  their 
peak  around  1650.  In  the  1560s,  the  janissaries  numbered  some  12,800;  in 
1609  their  ranks  stood  at  37,000,  a  number  which  remained  fairly  constant 
until  it  approached  70,000  in  the  protracted  war  with  the  Habsburgs  from 

17  Canbakal,  Society  and  Politics  in  an  Ottoman  Town,  pp.  68-70. 

18  Aksan,  Ottoman  Wars,  7700-7870,  pp.  53-57. 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850  341 

1683  to  1699,  and  61,000  a  hundred  years  later  in  the  1768-1774  war  with  the 
Russians.19  We  know  of  at  least  two  instances  when  the  janissary  muster 
rolls  were  inspected:  in  1688, 20,000  were  struck  from  the  registers;  in  1771, 
some  30,000  names  were  removed.20 

By  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century,  there  may  have  been  as  many 
as  400,000  janissaries  on  the  sultan's  payroll,  but  only  10  per  cent  of  that 
likely  exaggerated  number  could  be  described  as  campaign-ready.  Sultan 
Selim  Ill's  (1789-1807)  encounter  with  the  inflated  registers  is  recorded  in 
Ahmed  Cevdet's  history.  The  sultan  responded  angrily  when  his  advisers 
warned  him  that  it  would  take  decades  to  settle  the  claims  and  rectify  the 
registers  in  order  to  accumulate  salaries  for  new  recruits:  "My  God!  What 
kind  of  situation  is  this?  Two  of  the  barbers  who  shave  me  say  they  are 
members  of  the  artillery  corps!  If  we  call  for  soldiers,  we  are  told  What 
can  we  do?  There  are  no  salaried  soldiers  to  go  on  campaign.'  Let  others  be 
enrolled  we  say,  and  we  are  told  'There  is  no  money  in  the  treasury'  If  we 
say,  there  must  be  a  remedy,  we  are  told  'Now  is  not  the  time  to  interfere 
with  the  regiments.'"21  Cevdet,  an  admirer  of  Selim  III,  is  clearly  exculpating 
the  sultan  from  complicity  in  the  corruption  evident  in  this  story,  but  not 
those  around  him.  The  burden  of  janissary  privileges  and  entitlements 
had  become  intolerable  but  resistant  to  reform  because  the  entire  ruling 
class  was  benefiting  from  the  sultan's  largesse,  much  to  Selim  Ill's  chagrin. 

Selim  III  abandoned  the  accession  price  (the  gift  bonus  to  his  janissaries 
to  secure  their  pledge  of  allegiance)  because  he  had  no  money  to  pay  for 
it.  Certainly  part  of  that  had  to  do  with  central  janissary  salaries,  most  of 
which  were  paid  out  of  the  sultan's  treasury.  The  annual  Ottoman  budget 
of  the  later  eighteenth  century  has  been  reckoned  at  somewhere  around 
15,000,000  kuru§.  I  once  tried  to  establish  how  much  was  handed  out  as 
salaries  only  to  the  KapikuLu  janissaries  (infantry,  artillery,  armoury  only) 
during  the  1768-1774  war,  and  came  up  with  an  estimate  for  the  war  years 
1769  to  late  1771  of  6,005,453  kuru§.Z2  That  gives  us  at  least  an  idea  of  what 

19  Agoston,  "Empires  and  Warfare  in  East-Central  Europe",  pp.  128-129. 

20  Aksan,  Ottoman  Wars,  1700-1870,  p.  52. 

21  "Looking  at  a  recent  register  of 'active'  artillerymen,  in  order  to  estimate  the  financing 
available  for  new  recruits,  he  [Selim  III]  found  that,  of  1,059  troops  listed,  33  were  wounded,  90 
were  assigned  to  the  foundry,  90  to  the  rapid  infantry  corps,  76  to  the  fire  Ahmed  Cevdet":  Tarih, 
1st  edn,  IV,  pp.  265-266.  The  advisers,  of  course,  were  the  chief  beneficiaries  of  the  corrupted 
muster  rolls. 

22  The  two  main  defters  (tax  registers)  are  from  the  Prime  Minister's  Archives  in  Istanbul, 
Maliyeden  Miidevver  MM5970  and  MM11786.  The  payroll  (in  cash)  was  carted  to  the  Danube 
battlefront  in  great  caravans  of  oxcarts  and  counted  when  it  arrived. 


342 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


the  largely  dysfunctional  fighting  force  was  costing  the  dynasty  in  wages 
during  wartime,  and  does  not  take  into  account  the  provisioning  of  that 
same  force  which  was,  after  all,  just  a  portion  of  the  assembled  manpower 
estimated  at  100,000  for  that  war.23 

Such  numbers  do  not  generally  include  the  janissaries  assigned  to  the 
garrisons  across  the  empire.  These  are  the  subject  of  our  discussion  here, 
as  they  are  the  least  visible,  often  melting  into  the  reaya  and  merchant 
classes  and  no  longer  able  to  be  counted  on  as  a  fighting  force.  We  have  very 
scattered  information  on  the  size  and  distribution  of  such  forces,  but  a  recent 
discussion  of  the  problem  gives  one  rather  astonishing  figure  (from  1761-1762) 
of  55,731  central  troops  and  141,116  in  the  garrisons,  for  a  total  of  196,847. 24 

Garrison  janissaries  were  normally  paid  out  of  the  cizye  tax,  but  the 
regiments  in  each  of  the  garrisons  had  some  autonomy  over  collection  and 
management  of  their  salaries.  The  ocakkk  system  (tax  farms  assigned  to 
janissaries  and  local  forces),  while  not  universally  applied,  was  certainly 
in  play  at  the  main  garrisons  in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries. 
Tax  revenues,  such  as  the  cizye,  were  organized  as  a  tax  farm  for  a  particular 
garrison.  Initially,  it  appears  that  the  revenues  were  controlled  by  central 
officials  and  the  proceeds  were  sent  for  distribution  to  the  regiment  in  each 
of  the  garrisons.  Latterly,  the  collection  and  distribution  of  the  revenues 
appear  to  have  been  in  the  hands  of  garrison  officers  or  other  askeri  of- 
ficials. The  janissaries  and  garrison  regiments  were  self-governing,  so  it 
would  be  natural  for  them  to  acquire  a  certain  fiscal  autonomy  as  well, 
as  is  abundantly  evident  in  the  extant  inheritance  registers  of  the  askeri 
class.  By  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century,  such  resources  must  have  been 
considerably  stretched,  as  Ottoman  territories  on  the  south  shore  of  the 
Danube  became  the  Russo-Ottoman  battlegrounds,  and  the  size  of  the 
garrisons  increased.  Belgrade,  for  example,  had  4,917  janissaries  in  1771, 
which  cost  189,544.5  kuru§  for  wages  and  provisions.  The  cizyes  in  that  case 
were  drawn  from  fourteen  different  areas,  among  them  Edirne,  Sofia,  and 
Thessaloniki;  by  1779,  there  were  6,036  janissaries,  whose  wages  and  provi- 
sions cost  240,821.5  kuru§,  again  paid  by  cizyes  drawn  from  all  over  Rumeli. 
Vidin,  on  the  Danube,  a  true  frontier  fortress  by  1700,  had  7,863  janissaries 
in  1771,  at  a  cost  of  344,240  kuru§,  drawn  from  nineteen  cizye  sources.  By 
1779,  there  were  9,229  janissaries  in  the  garrison,  costing  416,813  kuru§,  and 
the  list  of  the  cizye  sources  had  climbed  to  twenty-five,  with  many  of  the 
places  showing  as  unavailable  (yok),  an  effect,  no  doubt,  of  the  conditions 

23  Aksan,  Ottoman  Wars,  1700-1870,  ch.  4. 

24  Agoston,  "Military  Transformation  in  the  Ottoman  Empire  and  Russia",  p.  304. 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850 


343 


of  war.25  If,  in  fact,  we  accept  the  figure  of  5,440  janissaries  at  Vidin  in  1750, 
recorded  elsewhere,  the  evolution  from  a  sipahi-based  timariot  force  to  the 
militarized  population  of  janissaries  is  striking.26 

By  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century,  the  city  of  Aleppo,  as  another 
example,  contained  a  large  number  of  rank-and-file  soldiers  (be§es)  engaged 
in  all  kinds  of  market  crafts  and  transactions,  including  small  amounts  of 
money-lending,  tax  collection  and  market  enforcement.  Charles  Wilkins  has 
analyzed  the  ocaklik  contracts  of  garrison  members  including  one  set  up  to 
pay  the  military  unit  stationed  in  the  citadels  of  Kars  and  Ardahan,  some 
considerable  distance  from  Aleppo.  Kars  soldiers,  mostly  citadel  guards, 
managed  their  assignments  by  subcontracting  them  as  tax  farms  to  resi- 
dents of  Aleppo,  including  janissaries  and  ulema,  as  a  means  of  increasing 
their  diminishing  incomes. 

Wilkins  concludes  that  these  soldiers  could  be  likened  to  merchants  of 
modest  to  middling  wealth,  who  show  up  in  the  court  records  as  property- 
owners  and  money-lenders.  The  career  of  one  Ali  ibn  Shabib  (d.  1678)  is 
instructive.  He  is  first  encountered  in  court  records  in  1640  as  second-in- 
command  of  a  local  garrison  in  the  Aleppo  region,  probably  of  Arab  origin, 
already  involved  in  operating  (renting)  a  watermill,  and  responsible  for 
collecting  certain  fees  his  regiment  owed  to  officials  in  the  city.  By  1657, 
he  is  still  recorded  as  the  second-in-command  of  the  garrison,  is  listed 
as  a  tax-collector  with  the  high  status  rank  of  agha,  but  has  also  become 
a  prominent  member  of  the  water  miller's  guild  of  the  city.  As  Wilkins 
notes,  "The  likelihood  [is]  that  soldiers,  as  they  took  up  trades  and  crafts, 
absorbed  the  cultural  norms  of  their  nonmilitary  colleagues,  thereby  dis- 
placing or  weakening  concepts  of  hierarchical  command  authority.  This 
process  was  probably  more  important  than  the  reverse,  of  merchants  and 
artisans  adopting  military  norms,  since  many  of  these  made  no  pretense 
of  pursuing  military  training  and  merely  sent  proxies  when  called  to  serve 
on  campaigns."27 

Damascus  provides  another  example  of  the  military  diversification 
and  expansion.  In  1708,  the  Damacus  governor  was  relieved  of  sending  his 
usual  contingent  of  janissaries  (500)  to  imperial  campaigns  in  exchange 
for  charging  the  local  military  forces  to  serve  as  guardians  of  the  Hajj 
pilgrimage  caravans  as  described  above,  and  sending  a  sum  of  money  as 
an  exemption  fee  (bedel),  one  more  way  the  state  might  raise  revenues  for 

25  Prime  Minister's  Archives  D.B§M  4274,  dated  1185-1193  (1771-1779). 

26  Gradeva,  "Between  Hinterland  and  Frontier",  pp.  340-341. 

27  Wilkins,  Forging  Urban  Solidarities,  p.  197. 


344 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


military  participation  (or  lack  of  it)  from  the  provinces.  The  Damascus 
military  population  of  the  time  includedyer//s  (local  janissaries;  elsewhere 
they  might  be  designated  as  guards);  the  Kapikulu  or  imperial  janissar- 
ies, ordered  to  Damascus  after  a  major  rebellion  of  the  mid-seventeenth 
century;  local  mercenaries  in  the  governor's  entourage,  variously  described 
as  Anatolian  levends,  Kurdish  musketeers,  and  North  African  mercenaries; 
and,  finally,  the  timariot  cavalry,  which  had  ceased  to  exist  by  the  turn  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  with  their  estates  likely  reassigned  to  local  ayans 
(warlords;  provincial  notables  or  elites)  or  janissaries.  It  is  tantalizing 
to  speculate  that  the  mercenary  population  grew  as  the  timariot/sipahi 
population  declined.28 

That  the  warrior  populations  came  to  be  such  a  large  part  of  actual  cam- 
paign forces  testifies  to  the  Ottoman  difficulties  with  regulating  military 
budgets,  recapturing  control  over  the  monopoly  on  violence,  and  negotiat- 
ing effectively  with  mobile,  warrior  subjects.  As  we  have  seen,  there  is 
much  allusion  to  the  problem  in  the  literature,  and  significant  work  on  the 
provincial  families  and  economic  factors  contributing  to  their  rise  after 
1650.  Very  little  empirical  work  has  been  published  on  the  size,  extent, 
and  impact  of  the  new  means  of  mobilizing  sufficient  manpower  for  the 
battlefields  of  the  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  centuries.  Janissaries 
consistently  failed  to  show  up  for  major  campaigns  and,  when  they  did  so, 
they  clamored  for  lands  vacated  by  sipahis  as  a  means  of  support;  bands 
of  warriors,  with  regional  and  occasionally  ethnic  loyalties,  increasingly 
replaced  them  as  military  labour.  What  is  discernable  in  the  information 
available  to  date  is  a  further  evolution  from  diverse,  eclectic  auxiliaries  in 
1700-1750  and  the  increased  reliance  on  ethnic  warrior  bands,  for  example, 
the  Albanians,  particularly  during  the  first  Russo-Ottoman  War  in  1768- 
1774.  The  systems  (janissary  and  levends,  with  the  gradual  disappearance  of 
the  sipahis)  overlapped  and  intertwined  until  1826  at  least.  The  Ottomans 
moved  to  a  conscript  army  in  the  mid-nineteenth  century,  but  ba§ibozuk 
regiments  were  included  as  auxiliaries  even  then. 

Auxiliary  cavalry  and  infantry  regiments  1700-1750 

By  the  late  seventeenth  century,  a  provincial  governor  was  expected  to 
arrive  on  campaign  accompanied  by  200  of  his  private  entourage  and  1,000 

28  Uyar  and  Erickson,  A  Military  History  of  the  Ottomans,  p.  108,  based  on  the  work  of  Abdul- 
Karim  Rafeq. 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850  345 

to  2,000  /evercc/recruits,  both  infantry  and  cavalry.  By  the  1720s,  these  latter 
were  paid  either  by  way  of  tax  privileges  (imdad-i  seferiye,  special  cam- 
paign taxes  and/or  cash)  for  the  provincial  governor  or  other  local  officials 
(called  kapi  halki);  through  tax  farming;  or  directly  out  of  the  sultan's  purse 
(miri  Levendat).  It  was  the  local  officials,  in  other  words,  who  had  become 
military  contractors.  If  statistics  are  to  be  believed,  this  system  expanded 
a  hundred-fold  from  the  siege  ofVienna  in  1683  to  the  first  Russo-Ottoman 
campaign  of  the  1768-1774  war.  According  to  one  estimate,  97,000  such 
soldiers  participated  in  the  1769  campaign,  meaning  perhaps  as  many  as 
100,000-150,000  levends  may  have  initially  been  mobilized  for  the  campaigns 
on  the  Danube  and  the  Black  Sea.29  Orders  describing  how  they  were  to  be 
mobilized,  both  infantry  and  cavalry,  reveal  the  understanding  of  the  state 
concerning  their  length  of  employment  and  salary,  as  well  where  they  might 
come  from  and  the  problem  of  control  over  such  troops. 

For  example,  an  order  to  the  governor  of  the  province  of  Anatolia  is 
quite  explicit.  Beginning  with  the  statement  that  their  misbehaviour  was 
the  cause  of  much  harm  to  the  countryside,  especially  as  they  had  not  seen 
service  and  rations  due  to  the  lack  of  campaigns,  the  order  announces 
the  coming  campaign  with  Russia,  and  the  urgent  need  for  manpower.  It 
continues  by  extending  an  amnesty  to  any  miscreants,  and  emphasizing 
the  necessity  of  gathering  them  up  for  the  spring  offensive.  Included  in  the 
order  is  the  reference  to  the  local  provincial  officers  (mutasarnfs,  governors 
of  sancaks,  subdivisions  of  a  province)  as  responsible  for  the  organization 
of  the  provincial  troops. 

Such  orders  were  usually  for  companies  (boliiks)  of  fifty  levends.  Spelled 
out  were  the  monthly  salary,  expressed  in  six  months'  lump  sums,  or  in 
two  months  for  an  extension,  for  passage  to  the  battlefront,  for  fortress 
duty,  etc.;  a  signing-on  bonus  (called  a  bah§i§,  an  incentive);  a  10  per  cent 
commission  for  the  officers;  and  a  calculation  oiyevmiye,  or  daily  rations. 
Except  for  their  temporary  status,  these  soldiers  on  paper  were  being  treated 
in  ways  which  approximated  the  janissaries.  Exhortations  were  included 
that  recruits  be  upright,  handsome  Muslims,  and  that  they  be  guaranteed 
by  their  local  communities,  who  would  serve  as  their  guarantors  in  the  case 
of  desertion.  Local  officials  were  responsible  for  the  selection  of  officers 
(and  often  served  in  that  capacity).  There  is  no  mention  of  arms  in  these 
documents,  so  one  presumes  that  these  recruits  were  to  bring  their  own 
weapons,  perhaps  part  of  the  explanation  for  the  hefty  signing-on  bonus 

29  Aksan,  "Whatever  Happened  to  the  Janissaries?",  p.  29,  "Ottoman  Military  Recruitment 
Strategies  in  the  Late  Eighteenth  Century". 


346 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


of  12  kuru§  for  an  infantryman  and  25  for  a  horseman,  the  difference  likely 
to  do  with  the  possession  of  a  horse.  Monthly  salaries  ran  at  2.5  kuru§. 
Equally  interesting  is  the  inclusion  in  these  documents  of  expected  rations. 
The  Levend  infantryman  at  war  was  expected  to  need  a  daily  intake  of  a 
double  loaf  of  bread  (100  dirhem  or  roughly  320  g),  or  50  dirhem  of  biscuit 
(peksimed  160  g),  and  was  allowed  half  an  okka  of  meat  (641  g);  a  half  kite 
(12-13  kg)  of  fodder  barley  for  the  packhorses  of  fifty  men.  The  cavalryman 
was  entitled  to  the  same  amount  of  bread,  but  only  100  dirhem  (320  g)  of 
meat,  and  additionally  100  dirhem  of  rice  (320  g),  25  dirhem  (80  g)  of  cooking 
oil  or  fat,  and  a  yem  of  barley,  roughly  6.5  kg  per  day  per  man. 

In  reality,  most  of  this  must  have  remained  highly  hypothetical,  as  the 
provisioning  system  for  the  campaign  of  1769  broke  down  completely. 
Evidence  at  least  of  one  effort  to  recruit  such  state  commissioned  regiments 
provides  us  with  a  good  indication  of  the  difference  between  expectations 
and  reality.  Historian  §  emidanizade,  serving  as  a  judge  in  Tokat,  in  Anatolia, 
in  1771,  was  required  to  enlist  1,500  soldiers  (he  calls  them  janissaries,  but 
they  must  have  been  levends)  to  be  sent  to  Ochakov  on  the  Black  Sea.  He 
picked  1,500  of  6,000  volunteers,  rejectingboth  young  and  old,  and  organized 
some  1,500  for  the  battlefront.  He  later  encountered  some  of  the  same  troops 
in  Sinop,  and  discovered  that  each  company  (of  fifty)  had  been  reduced  to 
eleven  men  and  a  commander.  He  was  told  that  the  Tokat  governor  had 
excused  the  men  from  service  for  a  payment  of  25  kuru§  (the  signing-on 
bonus  given  the  men?),  which  they  split  and  pocketed.30 

On  the  battlefront  in  1769,  Ahmed  Resmi  observed  the  arrival  of  the 
troops  from  Anatolia.  Clearly,  he  noted,  the  provincial  governors  recruited 
thieves  and  the  homeless  and  then  were  held  captive  by  them  -  at  every 
hamlet  or  bridge-crossing,  the  men  demanded  salaries  and  bonuses  and 
caused  no  end  of  trouble  in  the  camp.  While  individual  commanders  arrived 
with  enough  men  for  a  battalion,  in  three  days,  they  could  not  raise  even 
100  men.  And  even  should  the  commanders  bring  the  requested  500  or  1,000 
men,  they  continued  to  demand  pay  and  rations  for  any  participation  in  the 
war  effort,  and  tended  to  wreak  havoc  on  the  countryside  when  left  idle, 
especially  as  fodder  and  food  became  scarce.31 

The  reliability  and  loyalty  of  such  troops  were  obviously  acute  problems, 
as  determined  by  the  financial  stability  and  disciplinary  control  of  the  state, 
and  whether  it  was  able  (or  willing)  to  redistribute  provincial  revenues 
for  the  benefit  of  local  officials.  By  1775,  the  term  Levend  had  assumed 

30  Aksan,  "Whatever  Happened  to  the  Janissaries?",  pp.  31-33. 

31  Ibid.,  pp.  34-35. 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850  347 

such  disrepute  that  it  was  expunged  from  the  official  vocabulary  of  the 
Ottoman  documents  but,  as  with  other  such  labels,  the  term  persisted  into 
the  nineteenth  century.  Other  terms  began  to  emerge,  such  as  the  older 
sekban,  deli,  and  ba§ibozuk,  which  very  often  signified  ethnic  warrior  bands. 

Ethnic  warrior  bands  1750-1850 

That  is  not  to  suggest  that  bands  of  levends  could  not  just  as  well  have 
been  organized  as  local,  ethnic,  or  regional  companies.  It  is  simply  that  the 
mobile  populations  discussed  above  start  to  appear  in  large  numbers  in 
the  documentation  after  the  1770s  as  warrior  ethnic  groups  such  as  Kurds, 
Albanians,  and  Circassians.  While  the  levends,  volunteer  military  labor, 
still  have  a  whiff  of  the  coerced  about  them,  these  warrior  bands  emerge 
as  entirely  autonomous  guns-for-hire,  like  Mustafa  Vasfi  of  Kabud  cited  at 
the  beginning  of  this  chapter,  and  are  labeled  with  their  ethnicity  in  an 
era  when  nationalism  had  begun  to  emerge  as  part  of  regional  identities. 

The  first  significant  use  of  such  warrior  bands  show  up  in  the  Morea 
Rebellion  of  1770,  when  unrest  and  Russian  instigation,  along  with  the 
demands  of  the  ongoing  war,  triggered  a  violent  rebellion  of  the  Greek 
Orthodox  population  of  the  Morea.  The  Peloponnese  was  yet  another  of 
the  militarized  frontiers  I  have  described  above,  especially  since  it  had 
been  recovered  by  the  Ottomans  only  in  1715.  Vlachopoulou  describes  the 
emergence  of  a  local  class  of  Christian  officials,  the  kocaba§is,  who  both 
collaborated  and  contested  with  the  officials  of  the  new  government  and 
with  the  increased  presence  of  the  askeri  class.3*  The  state  records  of  this 
period  indicate  considerable  unrest  and  a  lack  of  stability  around  resources 
and  tax-collection,  much  as  we  have  seen  elsewhere.  In  1770,  then  Morean 
governor  Muhsinzade  Mehmed,  charged  with  putting  down  the  rebel- 
lion of  the  Greeks,  hired  levends,  most  of  who  turned  out  to  be  Albanians 
previously  destined  for  the  Danube  battlefront.  Some  10,000-20,000  troops 
obviously  disturbed  the  demographics  of  the  peninsula,  but  also  proved  to 
be  a  disaster  as,  once  they  had  brutally  suppressed  the  revolt,  they  refused  to 
leave  and  entered  the  contestation  over  local  property  and  other  resources. 
Muhsinzade  Mehmed  is  said  to  have  recruited  some  75,000  troops  from 
what  Nagata  calls  mahalli  kuvvetleri,  or  regional  forces,  to  quell  the  revolt, 


32  Vlachopoulou,  "Like  the  Mafia?" 


348 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


and  he  did  so  by  taking  loans  from  the  regional  notables,  which  he  officially 
recognized  as  ayans.33 

The  1787-1792  Russo-Ottoman  war  saw  an  increased  use  of  such  regional, 
contractual  forces  because  the  central  janissaries  were  simply  not  prepared 
to  fight.  For  the  1790-1791  season,  for  example,  Selim  III  reputedly  could 
find  only  6,000  combat-ready  janissaries  out  of  a  reputed  30,000  in  the 
city,  and  of  those  only  1,000  made  it  to  the  battlefront.  The  rest  fled  within 
a  day's  march  of  Istanbul.  The  payroll  records  were  packed  with  retirees 
and  noncombatants,  some  50,000  or  more  even  after  Selim  Ill's  experiment 
with  creating  new  troops,  assembling  perhaps  10,000  before  the  rebellion  in 
1807  which  removed  him  from  the  throne.  Quite  apart  from  the  fraudulent 
records,  the  janissaries  had  legitimate  complaints  about  arrears  in  their  own 
pay,  about  the  higher  salaries  given  to  the  new  troops,  about  the  conditions 
of  the  barracks,  about  the  insufficiency  of  their  rations,  and  about  the  state 
of  the  bread  specially  baked  for  the  corps.34 

Meanwhile,  on  the  Danube,  the  blending  of  peasant  and  soldier  con- 
tinued apace,  particularly  during  the  1787-1792  war.  Demographic  shifts, 
occurring  multiple  times  in  the  long  Habsburg-Ottoman-Russian  struggles 
along  the  frontiers,  had  seriously  altered  the  landscape  of  the  Ottoman 
borderlands,  and  created  large  numbers  of  landless  and  masterless  men 
as  previously  described.  Serbian  Orthodox  peasants  crossed  into  newly 
defined  Habsburg  territories.  Tatars  and  Circassians,  chased  from  Crimea, 
moved  into  Romania  and  Bulgaria  in  the  1780s  following  the  Russian  uni- 
lateral occupation  of  the  former  Ottoman  territories,  joining  the  janissaries 
already  mentioned,  who  were  in  effect  "coming  home"  after  a  hundred  years 
of  service  in  Hungary. 

Selim  III  had  little  choice  but  to  make  use  of  such  readily  available 
manpower  for  the  battlefields  of  1787-1793.  He  called  upon  the  provincial 
power-brokers,  such  as  Yanyah  Ali  Pasa  (of  Iannina,  Greece),  Pasvantoglu 
Osman  Pasa  (of  Vidin),  and  Alemdar  Mustafa  Pasa  (of  Ruse,  Bulgaria),  to 
name  but  three,  to  defend  the  borders  with  their  sekbans,  the  word  which 
replaced  levend.  After  peace  was  declared  with  Russia  and  Austria,  these 
same  locally  raised  armies  were  called  upon  to  put  down  Pasvantoglu's 
ongoing  bid  for  self-government  in  Vidin  on  three  separate  occasions,  all 
of  which  failed.  Pasvantoglu  died  in  his  bed  in  1807. 


33  Nagata,  Muhsinzade  Mehmed  Pa§a  ve  Ayanlik  Muessessi.  The  Albanians  (Shkiptar)  here 
described  were  likely  Tosks  of  the  mountainous  region  of  Albania. 

34  Sunar,  "Ocak-i  Amire'den  Ocak-i  Mulga'ya  Dogru". 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850  349 

Tolga  Esmer  has  vividly  described  the  culture  of  anarchy  and  banditry 
-  which  had  sekbans  becoming  kirca'alis  (a  place  name  that  came  to  refer 
to  particular  bandits)  and  back  to  sekbans  -  that  dominated  the  frontier 
from  the  1750s  onward.  "[T]he  borderlands  allowed  for  new,  alternative  ways 
of  making  a  living  that  spread  like  a  contagion,  eventually  luring  anyone 
from  the  humblest  Rumeli  Christians  to  the  highest  vezir  from  Istanbul  and 
Anatolia  into  Rumeli  and  into  the  networks  of  violence  [...]"35 

However  one  interprets  the  ethnicity  of  these  troops,  and  fixes  their  date 
of  origin,  the  important  aspect  is  that  they  are  ubiquitous  beginning  in  the 
Greek  rebellion  period  (1821-1831).  First  and  foremost,  Mehmed  Ali  of  Egypt 
derives  from  that  context,  and  it  was  his  own  Albanian  troops,  sent  to  Cairo 
in  the  Ottoman  fight  against  Napoleon,  who  helped  raise  him  to  power  in 
Cairo  in  the  contest  with  the  last  of  the  mamluks.Jezzar  Ahmed  Pasa,  com- 
mander of  the  fortress  of  Acre,  of  Bosnian  background  and  mamluk  (Cairo) 
experience,  was  known  for  employing  only  foreign  troops,  and  regularly 
hired,  for  multiple  campaigns,  mercenaries  from  the  Maghreb,  Albanian 
cavalry,  and  Bosnian  infantry,  as  well  as  delis,  who  have  been  described  as 
Kurds  or  Turkmen.  He  paid  them  well  and  with  his  army  (perhaps  as  many 
as  4,000-5,000  troops  of  mixed  origins)  he  successfully  defended  Napoleon  s 
assault  on  Acre  as  ally  of  the  British.  In  cooperation  with  the  imperial  army 
that  marched  overland  from  Istanbul  to  Cairo  in  1799-1801,  Jezzar  sent 
detachments  of  500  Albanians  from  time  to  time  to  the  imperial  camp  at 
Jaffa.  William  Wittmann,  eyewitness  to  the  British-Ottoman  campaign 
to  oust  Napoleon's  remaining  troops  from  Egypt,  observed  their  comings 
and  goings,  commenting  on  how  often  the  Albanians  mutinied  when  the 
grand  vizier  tried  to  muster  them,  and  how  they  frequently  deserted.  He 
notes  particularly  the  ongoing  quarrels  between  the  Albanians  and  the 
janissaries,  still  very  numerous,  but  impossible  to  recognize  as  the  troops 
of  old  in  a  campaign  which  also  introduced  the  first  of  Selim  IIEs  reformed 
troops.36 

The  later  extensive  revolts  of  the  Albanians  derived,  as  suggested  above, 
from  the  simultaneous  effort  to  draw  them  into  a  recentralized  state  and 
conscript  them  for  battles  between  Mahmud  II  and  Mehmed  Ali  of  Egypt. 
A  final  example  of  the  persistence  of  the  ethnic-band  mentality  and  volun- 
teerism  is  evident  in  documentation  around  the  1828-1829  Russo-Ottoman 
War  where  discussion  among  military  planners  indicates  the  ongoing 

35  Esmer,  "A  Culture  of  Rebellion",  p.  75. 

36  Wittman,  Travels  in  Turkey,  Asia  Minor,  Syria  and  Across  the  Desert  into  Egypt  during  the 
Years  1799, 1800  and  1801,  pp.  141-149. 


350 


VIRGINIA  H.  AKSAN 


difficulties  of  enrolling  the  Albanian  Tosks  in  particular,  of  making  them 
wear  uniforms  and  of  getting  them  to  enlist  either  in  the  regular  army  or 
as  basibozuks.  The  many  Albanian  rebellions  of  the  period  are  evidence  of 
a  resistance  not  just  to  the  Ottoman  effort  to  "colonize"  them  but  also  to 
the  attempt  to  force  them  into  a  disciplined  military  environment.  To  what 
extent  they  might  also  have  been  national  uprisings  belongs  to  another 
discussion,  but  it  is  easy  to  see  how  the  requirements  of  the  besieged  state 
and  the  last  warrior  populations  of  the  Ottoman  frontiers  were  inimical.37 

The  Fighting  for  a  Living  template 

The  Ottomans  seemingly  evolved  from  a  slave/standing  army/state  com- 
mission army  to  an  aggregate  contract  to  a  conscript  army.  Can  we  assume 
that  the  countryside  at  large  participated  willingly  (to  the  degree  that  that 
word  can  be  allowed  in  early  modern  societies)  in  the  war  efforts,  until  the 
worsening  of  the  economic  capacity  of  the  Ottomans  to  promulgate  war 
made  participation  dangerous  and  unprofitable?  So  what  made  these  bands 
continue  to  sign  on? 

Of  our  possible  permutations  for  this  project,  I  believe  it  is  the  entrepre- 
neurial aspects,  that  is,  the  emergence  of  the  world  market  economy  in  the 
seventeenth  century,  which  drew  much  of  the  participation  in  this  context. 
I  think  the  Ottoman  demand  for  manpower,  and  the  easily  accessible  (and 
willing)  labour  market  as  the  empire  drew  inwards  are  determinants  of 
some  of  the  policies  and  the  behavior  we  can  see.  The  records  indicate  that 
they  were  paid  -  in  cash  -  or  with  rights  to  the  tax  revenues  of  the  state, 
and  found  little  to  deter  them  from  plundering  their  enemies  or  even  their 
fellows. 

To  the  list  of  our  hypotheses  for  the  emergence  and  dominance  of  state- 
supported  militias  and  warrior-band  recruits  in  the  period  1650-1850, 1  need 
to  add  another:  because  it  was  already  a  way  of  life  which  increased  dramati- 
cally with  the  shifting  populations  and  worsening  economic  conditions  of 
the  late  seventeenth  and  early  eighteenth  century.  The  political  households 
that  emerged  were  strengthened  themselves  by  the  system  and  reluctant  to 
surrender  whatever  support  (tax  farms,  extraordinary  campaign  taxes,  and 
other  privileges)  that  came  with  the  military  "contracts".  In  other  words,  the 

37  Aksan,  Ottoman  Wars,  7700-7870,  pp.  352-356;  Anscombe,  "Islam  and  the  Age  of  Ottoman 
Reform";  Hakan  Erdem  discusses  the  thinking  of  the  Ottoman  commanders  about  how  to  engage 
Albanian  chiefs  and  their  soldiers  in  '"Perfidious  Albanians'  and  'Zealous  Governors'". 


MOBILIZATION  OF  WARRIOR  POPULATIONS  IN  THE  OTTOMAN  CONTEXT,  1750-1850  351 

Ottoman  need  for  manpower  not  only  facilitated  the  emergence  of  powerful 
provincial  notables,  it  also  sanctioned  the  flourishing  of  a  style  of  life  for 
the  individual  warrior/soldier  that  persisted  into  the  twentieth  century. 

I  will  leave  you  with  a  quote  from  a  recent  study  of  the  early  nineteenth- 
century  Greek/Albanian  context.  Lack  of  Ottoman  systemic  control  over 
that  region  produced  a  particularly  strong  paramilitary  culture,  as  we  have 
seen,  where  "the  development  of  strong  patron-client  relations  seemed 
the  only  socio-political  mechanism  left  for  survival.  Hence,  despite  their 
shortcomings  as  far  as  the  maltreatment  of  the  Greek  peasants  is  concerned, 
men  who  bore  arms  in  such  difficult  times  were  highly  respected  by  the 
agrarian  population."38 

In  sum,  post-1650  Ottoman  military  failures  were  largely  administrative, 
not  technological,  and  not  so  much  organizational  as  economic.  Just  as 
Europe  moved  to  social  discipline  and  uniformity  of  its  military  forces, 
incorporating  "native"  troops  in  regimental  fashion,  the  Ottomans  went 
native,  and  came  to  rely  on  a  federative,  mercenary,  or  paramilitary  force 
for  the  maintenance  of  its  remaining  territories  on  the  Danube  and  in 
Greater  Syria. 


38   Karabelias,  "From  National  Heroes  to  National  Villains",  p.  266. 


Military  employment  in  Qing  dynasty 
China 

Christine  Moll-Murata  and  Ulrich  Theobald 


This  chapter  explores  the  military  structures  in  China  between  1650  and 
1900  from  the  perspective  of  labour  history  as  devised  by  the  Global  Col- 
laboratory  on  the  History  of  Labour  Relations  1500-2000.  It  will  first  present 
the  basic  structures  of  the  Qing  armies.  There  follows  a  discussion  of  the 
state  of  the  art  in  research  and  the  major  issues  and  debates  in  this  field. 
Finally,  the  authors  assess  trends  and  tendencies  in  the  framework  of  the 
matrix  of  hypotheses  developed  within  the  research  group  Fighting  for  a 
Living. 

The  Qing  armies,  1600-1911:  a  short  overview 

The  Manchu  Qing  dynasty  ruled  China  between  1644  and  1911.  It  originated 
from  semi-nomadic  groups  of  the  Jurchen  confederation  who  lived  scattered 
across  the  today's  north-eastern  Chinese  provinces  of  Liaoning,  Jilin,  and 
Heilongjiang.  These  groups  defined  themselves  as  ethnically  and  cultur- 
ally distinct  from  their  mighty  numerous,  and  affluent  neighbours  in  the 
south-west,  the  Chinese  or  "Han",  and  began  to  refer  to  themselves  as  "Man" 
or  "Manchus".1  After  1600,  their  unifier,  Nurhaci  (1559-1626),  organized  his 
followers  into  socio-military  units  or  companies.  Family  members  and 
dependants  were  also  registered  in  the  military  households.  As  far  as  our 
knowledge  goes,  "followers"  implies  the  entire  population  that  had  pledged 
allegiance  to  Nurhaci,  voluntarily  or  by  force.  In  1615,  these  companies  were 
officially  divided  into  the  so-called  Eight  Banners.  Not  only  the  Manchus 
were  grouped  into  these  formations,  but  also  Mongols,  Koreans,  and  Chinese 
who  had  either  lived  in  the  areas  north  of  the  Great  Wall  or  had  submitted 
to  the  Manchus  before  they  started  their  conquest  of  China  proper  in  1644. 
In  1635,  Nurhaci's  son  and  successor  Hong  Taiji  (r.  1626-1643)  divided  the 
Banners  along  ethnic  lines,  with  a  Manchu,  a  Mongol,  and  a  Chinese  (the 
latter  also  called  the  "Chinese-martial")  Banner  assigned  to  each  of  the 

1  On  the  fluid  and  "inherently  transactional"  concept  of  ethnicity,  see  Elliott,  The  Manchu 
Way,  p.  17. 


354 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


eight,  resulting  in  an  actual  number  of  twenty-four  Banners.  The  Banners 
were  assigned  different  colours,  according  to  the  flags  and  uniforms  they 
carried  into  and  wore  during  battle.  Their  organization  was  dissolved  only 
after  the  fall  of  the  Qing  dynasty  in  1912. 

Precise  and  factual  figures  are  unavailable  and  are  subject  to  much  recent 
debate.  Roughly  speaking,  the  estimates  for  the  entire  Banner  population, 
including  men,  women,  children,  elderly,  and  dependants  (bondservants 
and  slaves)z  range  between  1.3  million  and  2.4  million  in  1648,  and  2.6 
million  to  4.9  million  in  1720.  The  potential  combat  forces,  that  is,  the  entire 
male  population  between  the  ages  of  ten  and  sixty,  may  have  been  between 
300,000  and  500,000  in  1648,  and  850,000  to  1.6  million  in  1720.  However, 
according  to  one  source,  only  one  in  three  men  in  a  military  company 
actually  engaged  in  combat.3  The  number  of  companies  has  been  estimated 
as  slowly  increasing  from  some  200  in  1614,  to  around  500  at  the  time  of 
the  completion  of  the  conquest  and  assumption  of  rule  over  the  previous 
Ming  Empire  (1368-1644),  and  1,155  by  1735. 4  A  competing  estimate  that 
assumes  the  higher  figures  of  companies  given  in  the  Qing  statutes,  320 
Manchu,  131  Mongol,  and  171  Chinese  Banner  companies  in  1644,  arrives  at 
a  total  of  168,600  men,  which  can  be  broken  down  into  96,000  Manchus, 
39,300  Mongols,  and  51,300  Chinese  troops.5  The  Banners  also  included  a 
small  number  of  Russians  from  the  post  of  Albazin,  of  the  peoples  of  the 

2  Bondservants  (Manchu  boot)  were  different  from  slaves  (aha)  in  their  status  of  being  allowed 
to  constitute  special,  hereditary  bondservant  companies  attached  to  the  Banners.  Some  of  them 
played  an  important  role  in  the  management  of  the  Imperial  Household  Department.  Most  of 
them  were  Manchus  (in  contrast  to  slaves,  the  larger  number  of  whom  were  Chinese)  and  were 
affiliated  to  other,  socially  superior  Manchu  households.  Although  part  of  the  Manchu  conquest 
group,  they  nevertheless  occupied  a  marginal  position  that  made  them  entirely  dependent  on 
the  throne  for  their  status.  While  slaves  worked  in  the  fields,  the  booi  were  primarily  used  in 
domestic  (and  military)  service.  Evelyn  Rawski  and  Susan  Naquin  are  not  so  sure  whether  the 
bondservants  were  ethnically  Manchu  in  their  majority  but  instead  say  that  they  were  Chinese 
captives  from  the  period  of  conquest.  See  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  pp.  81-84, 462  n.  95.  See  also 
Rawski,  The  Last  Emperors,  p.  167,  as  well  as  Naquin  and  Rawski,  Chinese  Society  in  the  Eighteenth 
Century,  p.  7. 

3  Fang,  "A  Technique  for  Estimating  the  Numerical  Strength  of  the  Early  Manchu  Military 
Forces",  p.  204,  based  on  statistics  in  the  Baqi  tongzhi.  Late  nineteenth-century  observers  speak 
of  a  strength  of  all  Banner  forces  of  400,000  troops,  157,000  of  them  garrisoned  in  the  provinces. 
See  Heath,  Armies  of  the  Nineteenth  Century:  Asia,  II,  China,  p.  28. 

4  Fang,  "A  Technique  for  Estimating  the  Numerical  Strength  of  the  Early  Manchu  Military 
Forces",  pp.  208-209.  Fang  states  that  no  new  companies  were  established  after  1735  (p.  204). 
Various  estimates  of  the  number  of  companies  in  the  early  period  exist;  most  scholars  agree 
upon  the  number  of  roughly  300  soldiers  per  company  for  the  period  before  1644;  thereafter, 
one  company  was  formed  of  100  to  200  men  of  service  age. 

5  Luo,  Laying  bingzhi,  p.  1. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


355 


Solun,  Daghur,  Sibe,  or  Olod  (formerly  Dzungars),  and  troops  of  certain 
other  Mongol  tribes  like  the  Chahar  or  Bargut.  The  Banner  soldiers  were 
mainly  cavalry  troops,  but  there  were  also  infantry  platoons  and  specialized 
musketeers  and  cannoneers,  as  well  as  a  few  garrisons  of  naval  troops, 
both  maritime  and  fluvial.6  The  Banner  troops  displayed  their  highest 
efficiency  as  combat  troops  in  the  initial  phase  of  conquest  of  China  proper, 
the  territory  south  of  the  Great  Wall  previously  ruled  by  the  Ming  dynasty. 

The  Ming  armies,  as  David  M.  Robinson  explains  in  this  volume,  were 
formally  bound  to  hereditary  service,  but  a  variety  of  forms  of  mercenary 
employment  existed  as  well.  While  it  is  difficult  to  weigh  the  relative  im- 
portance of  the  two  types  of  labour  relations  in  military  occupations,  we 
can  assume  that  such  legal  arrangements  were  not  entirely  superseded.7  In 
any  case,  the  efforts  of  the  Ming  to  hold  out  against  the  military  challenges 
of  the  Qing  and  internal  rebellions  required  large  amounts  of  military  pay, 
no  matter  whether  the  labour  relations  were  tributary  or  commodified; 
or,  rather,  such  efforts  would  have  required  large  expenditures.  According 
to  the  fiscal  historian  Ray  Huang,  even  repeated  tax  increases  after  1618 
remained,  from  a  military  point  of  view,  a  "slow  and  ineffectual  mobilization 
of  the  empire's  financial  resources",  which  led  to  desertions  to  the  bands  of 
peasant  rebels,8  or  eventually  to  the  Manchus.  The  garrisons  of  the  capital 
Beijing  had  gone  without  pay  for  five  months  when  the  city  fell  in  1644. 9 

The  initial  phase  of  Qing  conquest  roughly  corresponds  to  the  period 
1600  to  1680.  In  a  "second  wave"  of  Qing  conquest  and  expansion  towards 
the  north,  west,  and  south-west  (1680-1820), 10  other  -  Han  Chinese  -  armies 
became  equally  important  as  combat  forces.  This  started  out  with  the 
Kangxi  emperor's  (r.  1662-1722)  campaigns  against  the  Russians  in  Albazin 
(1685-1686),  against  the  Dzungars,  a  confederation  of  western  Mongolian 
nomadic  people  in  Central  Asia  (1696),  and  against  Dzungarian  influence  in 
Tibet  (1705-1706, 1720).  In  the  middle  and  late  eighteenth  century,  Kangxi's 
grandson,  the  Qianlong  emperor  (r.  1736-1795)  expanded  the  territory  under 
Qing  influence  far  into  Inner  Asia.  Furthermore,  he  conducted  military 
campaigns  against  what  could  be  perceived  as  interior  rebellions:  in  1787- 

6  Huangchao  tongdian,  p.  70. 

7  Huang,  "The  Ming  Fiscal  Administration",  p.  153,  points  out  that  "In  the  early  sixteenth 
century,  mercenaries  had  already  begun  to  outnumber  regular  members  of  the  wei-so  garrisons 
in  several  northern  frontier  commands.  Being  mercenaries,  the  new  personnel  expected  to  be 
paid  regularly." 

8  Ibid.,  pp.  167-168. 

9  Ibid.,  p.  168. 

10  Crossley,  "The  Conquest  Elite  of  the  Ch'ing  Empire",  p.  313. 


356 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


1788  against  a  rebellion  of  Fujian  immigrants  in  Taiwan  (which  had  been 
incorporated  into  the  Qing  empire  in  1683),  and  in  1795  against  the  ethnic 
group  of  the  Miao11  in  the  inland  provinces  of  Hunan,  Guizhou,  and  Yunnan. 
Although  the  emperor  had  styled  himself  "the  old  man  of  the  ten  completed 
campaigns",  "completion"  implying  "victory",  some  of  the  campaigns  against 
unruly  border  tribes  and  neighbouring  tribute  states  ended  in  disaster 
or  inconclusively,  such  as  those  against  Burma  (1766-1769)  and  Vietnam 
(i788-i79i)-12 

After  1644,  the  Eight  Banners  were  employed  as  garrison  forces  in  most 
Chinese  provinces,  with  the  highest  concentration  in  Beijing  and  on  the 
northern  and  western  borders  and  with  the  lower  density  in  the  east  and 
south.13  The  inland  provinces  of  Jiangxi,  Anhui,  Yunnan,  Guizhou,  and 
Guangxi  had  no  Banner  garrisons.14  At  all  times,  the  Banner  people  were 
largely  outnumbered  by  the  Han  Chinese,  who  by  1644  may  have  numbered 
between  100  million  and  150  million,  and  by  1776  about  260  million15  as 
against  a  maximum  of  4.8  million  Banner  people  of  all  ethnicities. 

For  the  defence  of  the  Chinese  interior,  the  Qing  relied  on  an  army  of  Han 
Chinese  soldiers  under  the  command  of  Han  Chinese  officers  subordinated 
to  the  Manchu  superstructure  of  the  provincial  administration.16  This  was 
the  so-called  Green  Standard  Army  or  the  Green  Battalions  (luying  bing).17 
Its  figures  are  usually  assessed  as  three  times  higher  than  those  of  the  Eight 


11  "Miao"  is  a  rather  general  term  for  all  non-Chinese  ethnic  peoples  in  south-west  China. 

12  Woodside,  "The  Ch'ien-lung  Reign",  pp.  25iff.,  points  out  that  the  "ten  campaigns"  refers  to 
the  wars  between  1747  and  1792,  which  were  carried  out,  in  chronological  sequence  in:  1747-1749 
against  the  Tibetan  rebels  in  western  Sichuan's  Gold  River  Valley  (Jinchuan);  1755  and  1756-1757 
against  the  Dzungars  in  Central  Asia;  1758  against  Turkic  Muslim  rebels  in  eastern  Turkestan; 
1766-1770  against  the  Konbaung  dynasty  in  Burma;  1771-1776  once  more  in  the  Gold  River  Valley; 
1787-1788  against  a  rebellion  in  Taiwan;  1788-1789  against  dynastic  quarrels  in  Vietnam;  and 
in  1790-1792  two  expeditions  against  the  Gurkhas  of  Nepal  who  had  invaded  Tibet.  The  1795 
expeditions  against  the  Miao  in  Yunnan  and  Hunan  were  not  included. 

13  Powell,  The  Rise  of  Chinese  Military  Power,  p.  9,  characterizes  the  garrison  structure  as 
semi-circles  centring  on  Beijing;  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  pp.  94-96,  describes  four  networks 
of  garrisons  guarding  Beijing,  the  metropolitan  area  around  Beijing,  Manchuria,  and  the  north- 
western frontier,  and  the  Chinese  provinces  as  "defense  chains". 

14  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  p.  369,  Appendix  C. 

15  Shepherd,  Statecraft  and  Political  Economy  on  the  Taiwan  Frontier,  p.  430,  Appendix  D3:  "Area 
and  Population  of  the  Eighteen  Provinces  in  the  Late  Eighteenth  Century",  based  on  1776  figures 
in  the  historiographic  work  Qingchao  wenxian  tongkao,  ch.  19  (1936  Commercial  Press  edn). 

16  Powell,  The  Rise  of  Chinese  Military  Power,  p.  12. 

17  Luying  is  a  special  reading  used  for  this  term.  The  alternative  reading  is  luying.  See  Hanyu 
da  cidian,  haiwaiban  (Hong  Kong,  1993),  IX,  p.  924,  and  Xing, "  'Lii/luying'  de  duyin",  p.  88. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


357 


Banners.18  The  role  of  the  Green  Standard  Army  is  less  well  documented 
and  researched  than  that  of  the  Eight  Banners.  It  is  agreed  that  it  drew  its 
personnel  from  surrendered  Ming  armies,19  from  volunteers,  and  from  local 
corps.20  The  Green  Standards  consisted  of  both  marine  and  land  forces.  The 
main  functions  of  the  Green  Standards  were,  besides  fighting  in  battle, 
those  of  a  constabulary:  patrolling  on  land  and  water,  guarding  government 
institutions  such  as  granaries,  capturing  criminals  and  rebels,  performing 
counter-insurgency  activities,  escorting  important  and  precious  convoys, 
such  as  copper  for  use  in  the  provincial  and  capital  mints  or  grain  tributes 
for  the  capital,  and  transporting  official  mail  and  dispatches.21 

The  decline  of  this  army  commenced  in  the  early  nineteenth  century  and 
became  sorely  visible  in  the  defeat  during  the  First  Opium  War  (1839-1842). 
This  mid-century  watershed  stands  at  the  beginning  of  the  last  phase  of  the 
Qing  dynasty,  which  was  marked  by  the  struggle  against  internal  enemies 
-  the  White  Lotus,  Taiping,  Nian,  and  Muslim  insurgencies,  to  name  just 
the  most  important.  In  addition,  the  foreign  intrusion  that  started  with  the 
First  and  was  aggravated  after  the  Second  Opium  War  (1856-1860)  led  to  a 
series  of  armed  conflicts  with  the  larger  west  European  nation-states  as 
well  as  the  United  States,  Japan,  and  Russia,  and  culminated  in  the  Boxer 
uprising  (1900-1901),  when  the  internal  and  the  external  problems  of  the 
Qing  converged. 

Already  in  the  eighteenth  century,  village  militia  (xiangyong,  "Braves 
of  the  Townships")  were  occasionally  recruited  by  the  local  magistrates 
of  some  regions.  The  permanent  deployment  of  Green  Standard  troops 
to  campaigns  in  the  border  regions  had  deprived  these  townships  and 
districts  of  their  constabulary  forces.  In  order  to  keep  up  public  security,  it 
had  become  necessary  to  recruit  additional  personnel  on  an  ad  hoc  basis. 
Not  much  information  is  available  about  the  payment  procedures  and  the 
level  of  payment  for  these  militia  troops  during  the  decades  around  1800. 
During  the  Taiping  rebellion  (1850-1864),  this  method  was  transformed  from 

18  Luo,  Luying  bingzhi,  p.  1;  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  p.  128;  Crossley,  Orphan  Warriors,  p.  117, 
who  quotes  the  figures  200,000  for  Banner  troops  and  600,000  for  Green  Standard  soldiers. 
This  1:3  ratio  does  not  seem  quite  convincing  in  view  of  the  more  recent  estimate  by  Elliott. 
However,  with  the  important  qualification  that  only  one  in  every  three  Bannermen  was  actu- 
ally called  up  to  active  service,  this  numerical  relation  seems  to  tally  with  reality.  In  the  late 
nineteenth  century,  western  observers  quote  the  figure  of  400,000  Green  Standard  troops,  as 
indicated  by  Prince  Ronglu:  Heath,  Armies  of  the  Nineteenth  Century:  Asia,  II,  China,  p.  28. 

19  Luo,  Luying  bingzhi,  p.  13. 

20  Powell,  The  Rise  of  Chinese  Military  Power,  p.  11. 

21  Luo,  Luying  bingzhi,  pp.  115-272. 


358 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


a  temporary  solution  to  standard  practice  to  ensure  the  public  safety  of  local 
regions,  and  another,  new  type  of  army  came  into  being.  These  regional 
armies  or yongying  "Brave  Battalions"  (with  a  membership  reckoned  at 
about  300,000)  were  formed  from  several  provincial  armies  that  had  stood 
under  the  command  of  powerful  individual  commanders,  such  as  the 
Hunan  army  or  the  Anhui  army.22  Western  and  Chinese  scholars  generally 
agree  that  these  military  organizations  saved  the  Qing  dynasty  from  an 
early  demise  -  although  they  were  supported  by  a  small  contingent  of  about 
3,000  mercenary  European  and  US  troops,  the  so-called  Ever-Victorious 
Army,  as  well.23  Manifold  attempts  were  made  to  reinvigorate  the  Qing  army, 
combining  Green  Standard  ranks  and  officers  with  Brave  Battalion  methods 
of  recruitment  and  employment,  and  adapting  to  western  weaponry  and 
training  methods.  The  increasing  recruitment  of  non-military  personnel 
to  replace  the  traditional  professional  armies  of  the  Eight  Banners  and  the 
Green  Standards  led,  in  the  eyes  of  some  scholars,  to  a  subtle  militarization 
of  the  local  government.24 

Finally,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Ming  dynasty,  arrangements  with  allied 
non-Han  chieftains  (tusi,  "local  administrators")  in  the  border  areas  who  had 
accepted  the  suzerainty  of  the  Qing  emperors  included  that  their  soldiers,  if 
necessary,  would  fight  for  the  Qing.  This  was  less  the  case  with  the  western 
Mongols  and  the  Kirgiz  who  were  generally  held  to  be  very  strong  and  a 
match  for  the  Manchus.  In  contrast,  the  native  tribes  of  China's  south-west 
(the  Miao),  of  Tibet,  Taiwan,  and  the  Muslim  city-states  of  the  Tarim  Basin 
were  dealt  with  in  a  time-tested  method  by  "using  barbarians  against  the 
barbarians"  (similar  to  the  tenet  of  divide  et  impera).  This  means  that  a 
submissive  native  lord  or  king  (of  "matured  barbarians")  dispatched  his 
own  native  troops  to  fight  against  his  neighbour  or  adversary  (the  "raw 
barbarians").  In  many  cases  this  was  the  preferable,  because  cheaper,  method 
to  pacify  unruly  tribes  in  the  border  regions.  On  the  other  hand,  the  col- 
laborating native  lord  could  enlarge  his  territory  and  probably  would  have  a 
prestigious  title  bestowed  upon  him  by  the  emperor.  Yet  this  kind  of  indirect 
rule  over  the  native  tribes  proved  ineffective  and  thus  was  gradually  given 
up  in  the  course  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Thereafter,  the  border  regions 
conquered  by  the  Qingwere  administered  by  imperial  officials.  The  conquest 
wars  in  the  south-western  region  were  thus  waged  by  three  different  types  of 

22  Liu  and  Smith,  "The  Military  Challenge",  p.  202;  Heath,  Armies  of  the  Nineteenth  Century: 
Asia,  II,  China,  p.  28. 

23  Liu  and  Smith,  "The  Military  Challenge",  p.  202;  Kuhn,  "The  Taiping  Rebellion",  p.  305. 

24  See  Kuhn,  Rebellion  and  Its  Enemies  in  Late  Imperial  China,  pp.  211-225. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


359 


troops,  namely  Banner  troops,  Green  Standard  troops,  and  native  or  "ethnic" 
troops.  A  typical  proportion  between  Banner  troops,  Green  Standard  troops, 
and  native  auxiliaries  during  an  eighteenth-century  war  was  about  i:io:3.25 

State  of  the  field  and  main  debates 

Though  the  study  of  Chinese  military  history  is  recently  expanding  in 
China  as  well  as  abroad,  military  labour  during  the  Qing  dynasty  remains 
a  relatively  little-studied  topic.  The  perspectives  of  ethicity,  institutional 
history,  military  finances,  China's  frontier  wars,  and  the  debates  on  Chinese 
armies  compared  to  armies  worldwide  offer  important  information  and 
possible  points  of  departure  for  the  study  of  military  labour  in  the  early 
and  mid-Qing  dynasty  armies. 

Research  into  Manchu  history  has  blossomed  since  the  reopening  of  the 
First  Historical  Archives  of  China  in  Beijing,  which  houses  the  most  impor- 
tant collection  of  Qing  central  government  documents.  The  Eight  Banners 
as  a  social  organization  figures  prominently  in  this  field.  Important  studies 
in  English  are  Pamela  Kyle  Crossley's  Orphan  Warriors  (specifically  the 
chapter  entitled  "The  Conquest  Elite  of  the  Ch'ing  Empire"),  Mark  Elliott's 
The  Manchu  Way:  The  Eight  Banners  and  Ethnic  Identity  in  Late  Imperial 
China,  and  Joanna  Waley-Cohen's  The  Culture  of  War  in  China:  Empire  and 
the  Military  under  the  Qing.  These  scholars  revise  previous  convictions 
about  the  Qing  dynasty,  which  saw  the  Manchus  as  largely  adapting  to 
Chinese  culture,  especially  to  Chinese  methods  of  civilian  administration. 
The  main  intention  of  this  new  approach  to  Qing  history  is  to  demonstrate 
that  a  complex  process  of  reciprocal  influences  continued  throughout  the 
Qing  reign.  In  their  analyses  of  the  role  of  ethnicity  within  the  Banners, 
this  approach  makes  clear  that  the  Manchus  did  not  constitute  a  majority 
in  the  Banners,  (and  in  some  Banner  garrisons  in  particular),  so  that  it  is 
not  appropriate  to  simply  equate  "Banners"  with  "Manchus".  Crossley's 
study  on  the  conquest  elite  stringently  analyses  the  fate  of  the  Han  Chinese 
or  Chinese-martial  within  the  Banners.26  The  Chinese-martial,  who  had 
chosen  to  identify  with  the  new  rulers  (but  some  of  whom  actually  had 
Jurchen  or  Korean  origins),27  were  not  treated  as  equals.  Within  the  Banners 
they  lost  prestige  and  credibility  when  three  powerful  Chinese-martial 

25  Theobald,  "The  Second  Jinchuan  Campaign",  p.  108. 

26  Crossley,  "The  Conquest  Elite  of  the  Ch'ing  Empire",  pp.  321-326,  339-345. 

27  Ibid.,  p.  321. 


360 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


generals,  Wu  Sangui,  Gengjingzhong,  and  Shang  Kexi,  who  for  their  help  in 
the  conquest  of  the  Ming  empire  had  received  large  territories  in  southern 
China,  later  betrayed  their  allegiance  to  the  Qing  in  order  to  establish 
independent  dynasties  of  their  own.  The  three  generals  were  defeated  in 
the  War  of  the  Three  Feudatories  (1673-1681). 

Further  armed  resistance  against  the  Manchus  arose  from  several  de- 
scendants of  the  Ming  dynasty  who  established  the  ephemeral  Southern 
Ming  Dynasty  (1644-1662),  and  from  Ming  loyalist  generals  who  wielded 
power  in  central  and  southern  China.  The  last  Ming  loyalist  polity  under 
the  rule  of  the  Zheng  clan  was  defeated  on  Taiwan  in  1683.  The  incorpora- 
tion of  the  island  into  the  mainland  province  of  Fujian  marks  the  final 
consolidation  of  Qing  rule  in  China. 

Elliot  in  The  Manchu  Way  makes  important  points  about  the  reasons 
why  the  Banner  people,  although  they  were  styled  as  "martial  elites"  by 
the  emperors  and  the  central  government,  became  impoverished  in  the 
course  of  the  dynasty.  This  was  due  to  two  reasons:  the  Banner  population 
increased,  and  some  Han  Chinese  falsely  claimed  to  belong  to  the  Banners 
in  order  to  enjoy  the  support  of  the  state.28  Therefore,  the  Qianlong  emperor 
incrementally  expelled  the  Chinese-martial  Banner  households  from  the 
Banner  structure  so  that  in  the  nineteenth  century  the  equation  of  Banner- 
man  and  Manchu  corresponded  to  reality.29  The  state  shouldered  increas- 
ingly larger  burdens  for  the  upkeep  of  these  warriors  and  their  dependants. 
In  a  study  on  the  military  expenses  in  the  Qing  dynasty,  Chen  Feng  cites 
figures  for  the  Xi'an  garrison  in  1735  that  suggest  that  the  expenses  for 
the  support  of  Banner  families  and  horses  were  much  higher  than  those 
for  the  soldiers  and  officers.30  According  to  Elliott's  estimates,  as  much  as 
one-quarter  to  one-fifth  of  state  revenues  was  used  for  the  living  expenses 
of  less  than  2  per  cent  of  the  population.31  In  comparison,  the  expenses  for 
the  Green  Standard  Army,  with  about  three  times  the  personnel  of  the 


28  For  the  "genealogical  turn"  in  the  early  eighteenth  century,  when  stricter  proof  of  Banner 
descent  was  demanded,  see  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  pp.  326-333. 

29  Ibid.,  pp.  342-344- 

30  Chen  Feng,  Qingdaijunfeiyanjiu  (Wuhan,  1992),  p.  47,  tables  2-12,  cited  in  Elliott,  The  Manchu 
Way,  pp.  310-311,  calculated  that  42  per  cent  of  the  expenses  in  silver  went  on  the  wages  of  soldiers 
and  officers,  20.5  per  cent  for  household  dependants,  and  37.5  per  cent  for  horses;  7.4  per  cent  of 
the  grain  disbursed  was  for  officers  and  soldiers,  90.5  per  cent  for  household  dependents,  and 
2.1  per  cent  for  the  horses. 

31  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  p.  311. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


361 


Banner  Army,  were  higher  in  absolute  terms  but,  at  27  to  32  per  cent  of  state 
revenue,  much  lower  proportionally  (if  the  3:1  ratio  is  correct).32 

More  economical  ways  of  maintaining  the  Eight  Banners  might  have 
been  possible.  The  options  would  have  been,  for  instance,  to  relax  the  ban 
on  Banner  people  taking  up  occupations  other  than  serving  the  state,  or 
to  assign  land  in  military  colonies  to  the  Banner  people  where  they  could 
have  organized  their  own  upkeep.  But  the  Qing  state  had  other  priorities, 
so  that  the  role  of  the  Banners  changed  from  being  mainly  fighters  to  the 
display  of  the  presence  of  the  ruling  elite  in  the  capital  and  in  the  provincial 
garrisons.33 

Monographs  and  studies  on  the  Green  Standard  Army  as  an  institution 
are  much  rarer  than  on  the  Eight  Banners.  In  1945,  Luo  Ergang  (1901-1997), 
an  eminent  specialist  on  the  Taiping  rebellion,  published  a  monograph 
which  still  is  cited  as  authoritative  in  present-day  scholarship.  Since  his 
focus  is  on  the  Taiping  rebellion,  the  largest  uprising  in  the  Qing  dynasty, 
his  particular  interest  was  in  the  decline  of  these  armies,  which  proved  to  be 
quite  inefficient  by  the  1850s,  and  their  replacement  by  the  new  provincial 
forces. 

The  differences  between  the  Green  Standard  Army  and  the  Eight  Ban- 
ners, and  ultimately  the  question  of  why  the  Qing  maintained  two  inde- 
pendent armed  forces,  have  long  preoccupied  military  historians.  Scholarly 
consensus  exists  that,  by  the  time  of  the  Taiping  rebellion,  both  were  in  bad 
shape,  poorly  equipped,  with  low  morale  -  with  the  qualification  made  by 
Crossley  in  Orphan  Warriors  that  the  British  were  amazed  at  the  fighting 
spirit  which  the  Manchus  displayed  during  the  attack  on  the  garrison  of 
Zhapu  near  Shanghai  in  an  episode  of  the  First  Opium  War.34  The  Manchus 
and  the  peasant  population  fought  with  "sticks,  stones,  rusted  swords  and 
wick-fired  matchlocks"  against  old-fashioned,  but  still  functional  British 
flintlock  rifles;  hence  their  resistance  was  doomed.35 

As  for  the  differences  between  the  two  kinds  of  armies,  Luo  Ergang  points 
out  that  the  Eight  Banner  Army  was  concentrated  in  fewer  garrisons,  while 
the  Green  Standards  were  widespread  over  the  entire  country,  and  unlike 
the  Eight  Banners  they  were  present  in  every  province.  The  tasks  of  the 
Green  Standards  were  more  varied,  and  lowlier  than  those  of  the  Banners, 
so  that  there  was  a  clear  hierarchy,  also  and  especially  in  the  pay  scale, 

32  Ibid.,  p.  310. 

33  Ibid.,  p.  311. 

34  Crossley,  Orphan  Warriors,  p.  117. 

35  Ibid.,  p.  118. 


362 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


between  the  two.36  Luo  emphasizes  that,  nevertheless,  the  Green  Standards 
served  more  important  functions  than  the  Banners:  their  numbers  were 
greater,37  and  they  were  the  better  fighters.38  There  is  a  certain  tendentious- 
ness  in  this  assessment.  It  was  made  at  a  time  when  the  prestige  of  the  Qing 
dynasty  and  its  ruling  elite,  the  Manchus,  was  at  a  very  low  point.  This 
also  highlights  what  may  seem,  in  contrast,  the  somewhat  apologetic  and 
perhaps  romanticizing  nuances  in  the  great  interest  in  the  Eight  Banners 
shown  in  present-day  China.  The  Qianlong  emperor  had  already  perceived 
that  there  was  a  gap  between  the  claim  that  the  Manchus  were  warriors 
dedicating  their  life  to  hunting,  sports,  and  battle,  and  the  fact  that  fewer 
and  fewer  Manchus  were  able  to  hit  the  target  in  archery  contests  and  to 
speak  Manchu.  Yet  when  it  came  to  substantial  failure  in  war,  the  blame 
was  often  shifted  to  the  "cowardly"  Green  Standard  units  that  deserted 
rather  than  to  fight  the  enemy.39 

The  native  troops  were  even  less  reliable  because  they  often  had  family 
relations  with  those  they  had  to  battle  against.  Most  military  successes  of 
the  Qing  armies  in  the  eighteenth  century  were  made  possible  only  by  the 
massive  deployment  of  elite  Banner  troops  from  Beijing  (the  Firearms  and 
Scouting  Brigades)  and  the  garrisons  in  the  north-east,  the  homeland  of 
the  Manchus.  Also  among  the  elite  troops  were  the  Olod  Mongols  who  had 
submitted  to  Qing  suzerainty  during  or  after  the  conquest  of  the  Dzungars. 
Thus,  troops  marching  from  Hi  in  the  far  west  and  from  Aigun  on  the  banks 
of  the  Amur  River  in  the  north-east  covered  thousands  of  miles  to  reach 
the  battlefields  in  Sichuan,  Burma,  Taiwan,  or  even  Nepal.  The  wars  of 
conquest  in  Dzungaria  were  predominantly  waged  by  Banner  troops.  There 
is  evidence  that  suggests  that  the  Banner  troops  did  not  simply  stay  in  the 
back  while  the  Green  Standard  troops  served  as  "cannon  fodder".  While 
the  proportion  of  Banner  troops  to  Green  Standard  troops  serving  in  a 
war  was  typically  1:10,  some  examples  demonstrate  that  the  proportion  of 

36  Luo,  Luying  bingzhi,  p.  6. 

37  Ibid.,  p.  7. 

38  Ibid.,  p.  9. 

39  See,  for  example,  the  first  assessment  of  the  disaster  of  Mugom  in  1773,  when  a  large  camp 
was  surprised  and  conquered  by  the  enemy.  The  blame  was  laid  on  the  "faint-hearted"  Green 
Standard  troops.  Instead  of  executing  all  of  them  (amounting  to  several  thousand  men),  the 
emperor  spared  their  lives  as  he  realized  that  they  had  to  be  supported  and  induced  to  fight 
by  more  contingents  of  Banner  troops.  See  Pingding  Hang  Jinchuan  fanglue  (Siku  quanshu, 
Wenyuange  edn,  digital  version  Zhongguo  jiben  gujiku,  65,  edict  of  Qianlong  38/7  [s.  1.  6]/ 
dingyou=Q  (this  citation  refers  to  the  ninth  day  of  the  seventh  lunar  month  in  the  year  38  of  the 
reign  of  the  Qianlong  emperor,  or  28  July  1773)). 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


363 


deaths  on  the  part  of  officers  in  the  Banners  was  3:10  or  even  7:10. 40  If  this  is 
a  representative  sample,  this  would  mean  that  proportionally  many  more 
Banner  officers  died  for  their  emperor  and  for  fame  and  glory  than  their 
colleagues  in  the  Green  Standards. 

Due  to  the  enhanced  accessibility  of  archival  documents,  issues  of 
military  finance  and  logistics  offer  a  large  field  for  new  inquiries  into  Qing 
military  history.  The  ground-breaking  study  by  Chen  Feng  has  already 
been  mentioned.  Recently,  important  publications  in  English  have  been 
produced  by  Dai  Yingcong.41  At  least  as  much  as  the  study  on  ethnicity,  this 
monetary  aspect  relates  to  military  labour  in  many  ways.  Dai  Yingcong's 
work  on  the  Gold  River  (Jinchuan)  campaigns  is  especially  explicit  about 
labour  conditions.  Her  studies  highlight  two  distinct  trends  that  stand  in 
close  relationship  to  labour  conditions  and  labour  relations:  the  Qing  state  at 
least  formally  put  an  end  to  corvee  obligations,  although  they  could  remain 
disguised  below  the  surface  of  general  tax  duties.  In  the  Gold  River  cam- 
paigns, military  employment  was  for  the  first  time  completely  organized  as 
large-scale  hired  labour.  Dai  Yingcong  quotes  a  figure  of  462,000  military 
labourers  recruited  in  the  six  years  of  the  second  campaign  (1771-1776)  as 
against  129,500  warriors.  The  workers  were  mainly  porters,  since  the  Qing 
armies  carried  all  their  provisions  and  the  silver  for  the  soldiers'  and  officers' 
wages  with  them. 

The  second  trend  was  the  increasing  involvement  of  merchants  or,  in 
other  words,  the  representatives  of  the  market  in  military  finance.  Alex- 
ander Woodside  has  emphasized  this  on  a  much  more  general  level,  by 
labelling  the  Qianlong  emperor  as  "the  big  merchants'  emperor".42  Mer- 
chants subsidized  the  Gold  River  campaigns  and  the  later  wars  against  the 
Gurkhas  with  millions  of  taels  of  contributions  (a  kind  of  tax  equivalent 
to  the  regular  taxation  of  entrepreneurship  that  was  not  levied),43  and  this 
social  group,  much  more  than  the  imperial  bureaucracy,  organized  the 
logistics  of  the  second  Gold  River  campaign.  These  two  trends  went  hand 
in  hand.  Although  this  did  not  concern  the  warriors,  it  may  well  have  been 
that  the  example  of  the  Banner  and  Green  Standard  soldiers,  who  did  receive 
wages,  stimulated  the  recruitment  of  military  labourers  who  were  to  receive 

40  Theobald,  "The  Second  Jinchuan  Campaign",  p.  137. 

41  Dai,  The  Sichuan  Frontier  and  Tibet,  esp.  ch.  6,  and  "The  Qing  State,  Merchants,  and  the 
Military  Labor  Force  in  the  Jinchuan  Campaigns". 

42  Woodside,  "The  Ch'ien-lung  Reign":  "the  salt  merchants'  emperor"  (p.  240),  "the  big  mer- 
chants' emperor"  (p.  241),  "merchant-loving  emperor"  (p.  267),  or  the  Qianlong  period  as  a  "reign 
of  plutocracy"  (p.  239). 

43  Ibid.,  p.  273.  One  tael  of  silver  equals  about  37.5  grammes  at  95  per  cent  purity. 


364 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


wages  and  food  provisions  like  the  soldiers.  The  emperor,  despite  the  im- 
mense assistance  the  private  hiring  of  porters  provided  the  supplying  of 
the  troops,  did  not  want  to  use  the  procedures  of  the  Gold  River  campaign 
as  a  precedent  for  future  wars.  Officially,  the  problem  was  not  the  price  of 
labour,  since  the  logistics  managers  learned  soon  that  it  was  as  expensive 
to  have  an  entrepreneur  ship  the  rice  as  to  have  this  done  by  the  local 
magistrates.  The  core  of  the  problem  was  rather  the  professed  systematic 
mistrust  of  private  entrepreneurship  from  the  central  government,  which 
was  convinced  that  supplying  the  army  should  remain  per  definitionem  a 
task  of  local  government.  Yet  it  is  not  easy  to  assess  how  many  of  this  type 
of  statement  decreed  by  the  emperor  were  purely  rhetorical,  or  to  what 
extent  the  emperor's  mistrust  was  instead  targeted  towards  an  eventual 
embezzlement  of  funds  which,  as  the  logistics  managers  claimed,  were 
necessary  to  pay  the  "expensive"  private  entrepreneurs. 

Perusal  of  specific  cases,  if  they  have  generated  as  much  paperwork 
as  that  of  the  Gold  River  campaigns,  can  shed  light  on  processes  in  the 
organization  of  military  labour.  These  would  remain  hidden  if  the  normative 
statutes  and  regulations  about  military  organization  alone  were  studied. 
Most  of  the  campaigns  of  the  Qianlong  emperor  are  well  documented  and 
have  left  information,  including  such  about  military  labour  and  service, 
which  can  be  applied  for  further  research.  For  instance,  one  topic  is  whether 
the  first  Gold  River  campaign  (1747-1749)  really  was  the  one  in  which  hired 
labour  was  engaged  for  the  first  time.44 

Recently,  the  conventional  wisdom  that  Chinese  civilization  was  dis- 
tinctly civilian  and  anti-military  in  outlook  is  being  revised  by  several 
authors,  for  instance  by  Harriet  Zurndorfer,  Rui  Magone,  and  Hans  van 
de  Ven.45  It  is  correct  that,  for  extended  periods  of  time,  it  was  centralized 
imperial  power  that  prevailed  in  China  rather  than  military  competition 
between  small  states  and  polities,  as  in  Europe.  However,  this  does  not  mean 

44  The  regulations  for  war  expenditure  in  the  Junxu  zeli  (Xuxiu  siku  quanshu  edn),  Hubu junxu 
zeli,  ch.  5,  claim  that  the  two  Gold  River  campaigns  were  the  sole  instances  when  merchants  were 
hired  to  procure  and  transport  grain  for  the  troops.  Yet  there  is  some  evidence  that  as  early  as 
1735  merchants  were  assigned  to  transport  grain  to  the  camps;  see  for  instance  Pingdingjunggar 
fanglue  (Siku  quanshu,  Wenyuange  edn,  digital  versionZhongguojibengujiku),  Qianbian  (First 
part)  39  (YZi3/io/jiashen=ig  [2  December  1735],  i2/wuzi=23  [4  February  1735]),  Qianbian  42  (QL 
i/6/dinghai=28  [28  January  1737])  or  Qianbian  44  (QL  4/4/yiyou=g  [16  May  1739]).  Merchants  or 
owners  of  camel  herds  were  apparently  able  to  ship  grain  at  a  lower  price  than  the  government 
with  its  "official  camels"  (guantuo). 

45  Zurndorfer,  "What  Is  the  Meaning  of 'War'  in  an  Age  of  Cultural  Efflorescence?";  Magone, 
"Die  Dichotomie  von  Zivilem  und  Militarischem  in  der  Qing-Dynastie",  pp.  18-23;  van  de  Ven, 
"Introduction". 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


365 


that  military  organization  was  unimportant  at  any  time  in  Chinese  history  46 
The  idea  that  it  was  the  prevention  of  warfare  and  "victory  without  war"  that 
preoccupied  the  Chinese,  rather  than  warfare  aiming  at  decisive  victory  and 
the  annihilation  of  enemy  forces,  is  being  discredited.47  At  the  same  time, 
the  often  cited  Chinese  proverb  that  "a  good  man  doesn't  become  a  soldier, 
good  iron  is  not  made  into  nails",  points  to  a  preference  for  the  civilian 
sphere  that  lasted  for  hundreds  of  years.  It  stands  in  conjunction  with  lesser 
prestige  for  military  than  for  civilian  occupations  and  leadership  functions. 
Such  ideas  were  overcome  in  periods  of  dynastic  or  systemic  change  as  in 
the  twentieth  century.  Yet  in  view  of  the  present  brush-up  of  the  military 
image,  it  seems  necessary  to  keep  the  focus  on  the  actual  priority  that  was 
given  to  civilian  office  until  the  twentieth  century. 

Labour  relations  in  Qing  dynasty  military  occupations 

Military  labour  can  occur  in  all  of  the  three  great  categories  described  in 
the  taxonomy  developed  by  the  Global  Collaboratory  on  the  History  of 
Labour  Relations:  namely  reciprocal,  tributary,  and  commodified.  Recipro- 
cal labour  implies  that  workers  provide  labour  within  the  household  and 
the  community.  In  most  parts  of  the  world  from  1650  to  1800,  this  consisted 
of  agricultural  labour  and  mostly  unpaid  household  work.  However,  it  can 
also  apply  in  some  hunter-gatherer  village  communities,  where  defensive 
and  hunting  duties  might  form  part  of  the  (mostly)  male  life  cycle.  At  the 
borders  of  Qing  China,  such  arrangements  are  known  in  the  Taiwanese 
indigenous  population,  where  boys  and  men  between  age  six  and  forty  were 
expected  to  serve  their  community  in  this  type  of  occupation. 

In  larger  polities  that  cannot  be  regarded  as  part  of  the  extended  family, 
the  labour  power  of  the  populace  is  often  considered  to  be  the  property  of 
the  state  or  feudal  and  religious  authorities.  This  work  is  not  commodified, 
and  the  respective  labour  relations  have  been  designated  as  "tributary". 
For  military  labour,  this  type  of  labour  relation  can  be  found  in  military 
conscription,  military  corvee,  and  obligatory  supply  services  of  all  kinds. 
A  third  category  consists  of  commodified  labour.  This  is  the  case  if  an  em- 
ployer acquires  labour  power  and  usually  pays  for  it.  In  the  case  of  military 
labour,  mercenary  troops  and  commissioned  armies  belong  to  this  type. 


46  Van  de  Ven,  "Introduction",  p.  11. 

47  Ibid.,  p.  2,  citing  Geoffrey  Parker. 


366 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


If  applied  to  the  armies  of  the  Qing  dynasty,  the  specific  situations  need 
to  be  assessed  separately  for  the  Eight  Banners,  the  competitors  to  the 
Banner  Armies  in  the  Ming-Qing  transition,  the  Green  Standard  Army 
supply  services,  specialists,  civilian  officials,  militia  troops,  the  Taiping 
army  and  provincial  armies,  and  the  new  armies  established  after  1865. 

The  Eight  Banners  constitute  an  example  of  polyethnic,  tributary  labour 
that  was  a  "hereditary  privilege",48  rather  than  an  onerous  obligation.  The 
court  had  taken  the  political  decision  to  support  this  "conquest  elite"  in 
money  and  kind,  even  if  they  were  not  active  in  military  or  civilian  service.49 
Banner  people  were  not  supposed  or  allowed  to  take  up  occupations  other 
than  service  for  the  state.  This  could  be  military  for  combat  or  garrison  duty, 
but  also  civilian.50  It  was  only  near  the  end  of  Qing  rule,  in  1863,  that  the 
ban  on  market-oriented  occupations  was  officially  lifted.51  In  other  words, 
this  type  of  labour  was  not  entirely  free,  since  it  was  linked  to  descent,  and 
formally  options  other  than  service  were  not  allowed. 

While  the  Green  Standard  troops  also  supervised  the  postal  service, 
patrolled  cities  and  spots  of  strategic  importance,  caught  bandits,  and  sup- 
pressed rebellions,  the  Banner  troops  were  mainly  deployed  to  wage  war.  Yet 
there  were  also  exceptions  like  the  Guards  Brigade  in  the  capital  which  had 
to  provide  personnel  to  protect  the  imperial  palace.  Banner  troops  were  not 
generally  used  when  a  crisis  erupted.  Most  wars  began  as  a  local  problem 
of  unrest  or  an  imminent  threat  to  a  particular  locality.  Therefore,  the  first 
troops  to  be  dispatched  were  Green  Standard  troops,  not  Banner  troops.  If 
a  local  crisis  expanded  into  a  war,  it  was  still  considered  a  local  affair  for 
which  the  governor-general  of  the  respective  region  was  responsible.  In 
such  cases  Banner  troops  from  the  local  Banner  garrison(s)  were  dispatched 
to  support  the  Green  Standard  units.  Yet  the  Banner  garrisons  were  quite 
small  and  could  mobilize  only  a  small  number  of  troops.  If  not  sufficient, 
Green  Standard  troops  from  other  provinces  were  also  sent  for  assistance. 
In  contrast,  elite  Banner  troops  from  the  capital  and  the  north-east  were 
sent  to  the  war  theatre  only  if  really  necessary.  Bannermen,  although  more 
expensive  than  Green  Standard  troops,  also  proved  to  be  more  effective.  The 
designations  of  particular  Banner  platoons  (like  huoqiying  "Firearms  Bri- 

48  Elliott,  TheManchu  Way,  p.  308. 

49  Compare  ibid.,  p.  201,  who  points  out  that,  if  the  Banner  people  failed  to  find  work,  it  had 
to  be  found  for  them,  "by  way  of  pretext  for  the  payment  of  a  salary". 

50  Crossley,  "The  Conquest  Elite  of  the  Ch'ing  Empire",  p.  318,  who  lists  work  as  "salaried 
policemen,  foot  soldiers,  scribes,  teachers,  porters,  and  accountants  in  the  segregated  urban 
garrison  communities"  as  typical  occupations  of  the  Banner  people. 

51  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  p.  311. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


367 


gade",  pao  xiaoji  "artillerymen",  or  niaoqiang  canting  "musketry  regimental 
commander")  in  the  Qing  statutes  date  from  the  early  eighteenth  century. 
Therefore  it  is  not  certain  how  many  troops  had  muskets,  cannons,  and 
howitzers,  and  how  many  of  them  had  to  fight  with  bows  and  arrows.  The 
latter  were  seen  as  genuinely  Manchurian  and  were  of  great  use  in  the  wars 
against  the  Dzungars.  The  copper-plate  engravings5*  depicting  the  victories 
of  the  Qing  show  a  high  number  of  mounted  archers,  but  also  musketeers, 
gunners,  and  sword-fighters.  Gunnery  seemed  not  to  have  been  a  monopoly 
of  the  Artillery  Brigade  in  the  capital.  Guns  or  howitzers  were  in  many  cases 
cast  on  the  spot,  for  which  purpose  experts  had  to  be  available. 

When  dispatched  to  the  battlefield,  Banner  troops  were  given  so-called 
baggage  pay  (xingzhuangyiri)  that  was  different  for  each  officer  rank.  It 
was  higher  for  Banner  troops  from  the  north-east  than  for  those  from  the 
provincial  garrisons  elsewhere,  but  lower  than  the  baggage  pay  for  the 
troops  from  the  capital.  On  the  way  to  the  theater  of  war  and  in  the  field, 
the  troops  were  given  a  so-called  salt-and-vegetable  (or  "salted  vegetable") 
pay  (yancaiyin)  to  buy  food.  The  regulations  concerning  the  baggage  pay, 
the  salt-and-vegetable  pay,  and  the  number  of  menservants  and  horses  an 
officer  versus  a  common  soldier  could  dispose  of  were  extremely  complex. 
In  the  beginning,  the  regulations  differed  from  province  to  province, 
and  there  were  many  imbalances  so  that  by  the  late  1770s  the  emperor 
ordered  the  compilation  of  a  nationwide  code  of  regulations  for  military 
expenditure,  the  Junxuzeli.  The  level  of  payment  in  this  code  was  generally 
somewhat  higher  than  before.  The  baggage  pay  was  a  quite  high  amount 
and  was  roughly  equal  to  one  year's  salary.  It  could  be  paid  out  to  the  family 
that  remained  in  the  home  garrison,  but  it  could  also  be  forwarded  to  the 
destination  where  it  was  paid  out  in  the  camp.  From  this  money,  the  soldier 
had  to  acquire  weapons,  clothing,  a  tent,  and  a  horse,  but  there  also  was 
sufficient  money  left  over  to  pay  back  his  debts.53  No  wonder  a  war  was 
seen  as  an  ideal  opportunity  to  make  money.  The  salt-and-vegetable  pay 
was  not  very  high.  It  was  meant  to  be  just  sufficient  to  still  hunger  and  to 
regenerate  physical  strength.  Alongside  this,  everybody  was  given  a  fixed 
amount  of  rice  (about  one  litre)  per  day.  The  distribution  of  rice  was  to 
prevent  the  tendency  to  save  money  instead  of  spending  it  on  food.  Yet 
there  were  also  cases  reported  where  troops  sold  their  rice  in  order  to  earn 

52  Examples  of  monochrome  battle  pictures  can  be  seen  at:  "The  Battle  Copper  Prints",  owned 
by  Staatsbibliothek  zu  Berlin,  electronic  publication  http://crossasia.org/digital/schlachten- 
bilder/index/english-start  (accessed  20  October  2013). 

53  On  the  financial  situation  of  the  Bannermen,  see  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  pp.  313-322. 


368 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


some  cash.54  The  duration  of  service  is  not  easy  to  assess.  Banner  troops 
had  a  lifelong  obligation  to  serve,  but  their  actual  service  in  war  depended 
on  the  location  of  the  garrison  and  the  length  of  the  campaign.  Troops 
from  the  coastal  provinces  were  very  rarely  involved  in  wars:  only  during 
those  against  Burma,  Taiwan,  and  Vietnam.  The  garrisons  with  the  highest 
potential  to  be  activated  for  campaigning  were  located  in  Shaanxi,  Gansu, 
Sichuan,  Hubei,  Hunan  (the  "belly  of  the  empire"),  the  capital  Beijing,  and 
the  north-east.  The  longest  single  campaign  of  the  eighteenth  century  was 
the  second  campaign  in  the  Gold  River  region,  which  lasted  for  fifty  months. 
Furloughs  were  totally  unknown,  unless  a  soldier  was  wounded.  In  this  case, 
he  was  granted  three  months'  leave,  and  he  could  also  return  to  his  home 
garrison  during  that  time.  The  Banner  troops  served  thirty-one  months 
on  average,  Green  Standard  troops  thirty-eight  months,  and  native  troops 
forty  months.55 

The  bondservants,  who  served,  among  other  obligations,  as  supply  forces 
for  the  Eight  Banner  soldiers  and  officers,  were  less  free  than  the  warriors, 
but  some  among  their  ranks  could  gain  great  personal  influence  and  wealth. 
For  instance  Cao  Yin  (1658-1712),  the  director  of  the  Imperial  Silk  Weaveries 
in  Nanjing  and  concurrently  supervisor  of  salt  production  and  distribution 
in  central  China,  gained  those  important  civilian  positions  due  to  his  close 
personal  relationship  to  the  Kangxi  emperor.56  Yet  few  bondservants  rose 
that  high.  Most  spent  lives  dependent  upon  their  Banners  and  the  household 
they  were  assigned  to.  Elliott  gives  figures  of  the  ratios  of  dependants  per 
employed  Bannerman  as  10:1  in  locations  with  lesser  work  opportunities, 
but  for  Beijing  about  5U.57 

Not  all  dependants  were  bondservants.  One  group  that  stood  even  lower 
in  the  hierarchy  were  the  slaves  that  were  assigned  to  specific  Banner  house- 
holds which  they  could  not  leave.  However,  social  mobility  was  possible. 
Thus,  many  slaves  could  rise  to  the  ranks  of  bondservants.58  The  specific 
tasks  of  the  dependants  of  Bannermen  in  warfare  still  need  to  be  explored. 
However,  a  few  words  can  be  said  about  the  special  type  of  manservant 
(genyi,  literally  "follower  servant")59  that  each  warrior  (officer  or  common 

54  Pingding  Liang Jinchuanfangliie,  57,  fols  25b-26b  (QL  38/r3/dinghai=28). 

55  Theobald,  "The  Second  Jinchuan  Campaign",  pp.  130-132. 

56  Hummel,  Eminent  Chinese  of  the  Ch'ing  Period,  pp.  740-742. 

57  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  p.  117. 

58  Ibid.,  p.  51. 

59  The  termyi  is  the  same  word  as  for  unpaid  corvee  labour  of  ancient  times,  making  it  seem- 
ingly a  kind  of  slave  labour,  which  is  not  correct.  The  Manchu  term  is  dahaltu,  which  also  means 
"following  servant". 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


369 


soldier)  disposed  of  during  wartime.  The  menservants  were  important  for 
the  everyday  processes  of  a  campaigning  army.  They  served  their  masters 
in  erecting  the  tents,  cooking  food,  cleaning  clothing  and  weaponry,  guid- 
ing the  sumpter-mules,  cutting  grass  for  the  horses,  carrying  letters,  or 
forwarding  information;  some  were  used  as  translators.  The  menservants 
of  the  Green  Standard  troops  could  even  be  used  as  soldiers  and  therefore 
in  some  provinces  were  called  "supplementary  troops"  (yuding).  Although 
most  sources  speaking  of  menservants  are  related  to  campaigning,  there  is 
also  evidence  that  they  were  used  in  peacetime  and  for  civilian  purposes. 
This  circumstance  and  the  fact  that  menservants  to  the  Green  Standard 
troops  were  automatically  seen  as  part  of  the  corps  lead  to  the  conclusion 
that  they  were  not  explicitly  recruited  for  warfare  but  were  permanently 
affiliated  to  military  households.  In  the  case  of  the  Banner  households  it 
has  to  be  assumed  that  bondservants  and  slaves  took  over  this  role,  while 
in  the  case  of  the  Green  Standard  this  function  may  have  been  performed 
by  sons,  youngsters,  and  new  recruits  (xinmubing).  Even  native  officers 
were  allowed  the  privilege  of  maintaining  menservants. 

Menservants  thus  stayed  with  their  masters  in  the  war  theatre  as  long  as 
the  latter  had  to  fight.  If  their  masters  died,  they  were  obliged  to  bring  back 
the  coffins.  Yet  this  applied  only  to  Banner  officers,  not  to  common  soldiers, 
and  was  not  the  case  for  the  Green  Standard  officers.  Menservants  were 
also  paid  out  salt-and-vegetable  money  and  were  given  a  daily  ration  of  rice. 
Moreover,  menservants  of  the  Banner  troops  received  their  own  sumpter- 
horses  to  transport  luggage,  tent,  and  weaponry.  The  common  troops  of 
provincial  Banner  garrisons  had  an  allowance  for  one  manservant  per  two 
soldiers.  In  Green  Standard  units,  ten  common  soldiers  were  entitled  to 
receive  wages  for  three  menservants.60  This  means  that  between  a  quarter 
and  a  third  of  the  fighting  corps  were  menservants  and  had  a  position, 
seen  from  their  duties,  somewhere  between  the  status  of  labourers  and 
ad  hoc  fighters.  The  regulations  in  the  code  for  military  expenditure  state 
only  how  much  the  government  would  pay  for.  If  a  soldier  preferred  to  be 
served  by  his  own  manservant  instead  of  sharing  one  with  his  colleagues, 
he  would  have  to  pay  that  manservant  out  of  his  own  purse.  Conversely,  a 
lieutenant  served  by  only  two  menservants  could  claim  to  have  employed 
three  menservants  and  receive  the  extra  money. 

The  time  period  of  the  Ming-Qing  transition  corresponds  to  the  cross- 
section  year  of  1650.61  This  transition  was  of  relatively  short  duration.  Mul- 

60  Compare  Junxu  zeli,  Hubu  junxu  zeli,  chs  3-4. 

61  See  below  and  n.  100  for  an  explanation  of  this  term. 


370 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


tiple  arrangements  occurred  in  military  labour  relations.  On  the  whole,  the 
situation  is  not  as  well  documented  as  for  the  Ming  and  Qing  dynasties,  and 
military  statutes  or  legislation  are  not  available  for  the  contending  armies  of 
the  southern  Ming,  the  Ming  loyalists,  and  the  Three  Feudatories.  The  polity 
that  lasted  longest  was  that  of  the  Zheng  clan  (1647-1683),  founded  by  Zheng 
Chenggong  (1624-1662),  also  known  as  Koxinga.  Zheng  Chenggong's  army 
and  navy  comprised  people  who  were  recruited  in  different  ways.  Based 
on  textual  evidence  in  the  scattered  sources  on  the  Zheng  government, 
the  Taiwanese  historian  Shi  Wanshou  has  pointed  out  that  in  the  early 
stages  Zheng's  troops,  which  he  raised  practically  from  scratch,  were  a  mere 
300  men,  whom  he  had  recruited  in  a  manner  that  suggests  commodified 
labour.  Additional  fighters  joined  him  on  their  own  initiative  to  defend  the 
cause  of  the  Ming.62  Zheng's  father  Zhilong  had  been  a  freebooting  trader 
who  had  already  established  an  army  and  navy  of  his  own,  which  at  first 
he  led  into  battle  against  the  Manchus.  When  promised  the  governorship 
of  two  important  south-eastern  provinces,  Zheng  Zhilong  defected  to  the 
Qing  in  1655,  but  the  Qing  did  not  keep  their  word  and  took  him  to  Beijing 
where  he  was  kept  under  close  supervision.63  His  remaining  soldiers  were 
divided  among  other  commanders  of  his  family,  and  gradually  joined  Zheng 
Chenggong's  forces. 

These  three  recruitment  methods  are  referred  to  as  "free  recruitment", 
"self-recommendation",  and  "incorporation  of  allied  troops".64  Zheng  Cheng- 
gong succeeded  in  expanding  his  sphere  of  influence  in  south-eastern 
China,  so  that  by  its  high  point  in  1658,  according  to  contemporary  sources  it 
boasted  170,000  armoured  men,  8,000  soldiers  with  iron  [weapons?]  (tieren, 
lit.  "iron  men"),  and  8,000  battleships.65  However,  after  a  grave  defeat  during 
an  attack  on  Nanjing,  Zheng  had  to  take  refuge  on  Taiwan  in  1661  and  died 
in  the  following  year.  In  the  expansionary  phase  between  1655  and  1659, 
troops  who  had  first  fought  for  the  Qing  defected  or  were  made  to  surrender 
to  Zheng's  army.  This  constituted  a  further  manner  of  recruitment,  the 
so-called  incorporation  of  enemy  troops  after  capitulation.  After  the  large- 
scale  retreat  to  Taiwan,  which  involved  a  siege  and  the  eventual  expulsion 
of  a  contingent  of  Dutch  colonialists  in  the  service  of  the  Dutch  East  Asia 
Company  VOC,  a  relatively  peaceful  period  continued  until  the  mid-i670s. 
Military  colonization  was  a  matter  of  survival  for  the  Zheng  regime  as  a 

62  Shi,  "Lun  Ming  Zheng  de  bingyuan"  pp.  188-189. 

63  Struve,  "The  Southern  Ming,  1644-1662",  p.  676. 

64  Shi,  "Lun  Ming  Zheng  de  bingyuan",  p.  196. 

65  Ibid.,  p.  193,  citing  Minhaijiyao  for  the  year  1658. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


371 


whole  as  well  as  for  the  individual  soldiers.  The  Zheng  government  launched 
several  land-cultivation  campaigns  in  Taiwan,  where  soldiers  were  expected 
to  clear  the  land  in  a  labour  arrangement  that  resembled  tenancy.66  Due 
to  the  steady  decrease  in  the  Zhengs'  military  manpower,  military  con- 
scription and  corvee  labour  were  implemented  as  a  matter  of  last  resort. 
The  latter  was  utilized  especially  for  military  labour,  for  transportation  of 
provisions,  and  for  the  rebuilding  of  a  fort.67  The  era  of  the  Zhengs  is  thus 
a  case  in  point  for  a  trend  of  changing  from  more  commodified  to  more 
tributary  labour  for  reasons  of  labour  scarcity  and  lacking  finances  at  the 
end  of  a  short-lived  rule. 

According  to  Luo  Ergang,  employment  in  the  Green  Standard  Army 
was  voluntary,  but  it  was  intended  to  last  a  lifetime.  It  was  hereditary  in 
the  sense  that  at  age  sixteen  the  sons  of  soldiers  had  the  right  -  but  not  the 
obligation  -  to  present  themselves  for  mustering  and,  if  found  acceptable, 
be  admitted  to  the  army  as  "apprentice"  or  "expectant"  soldiers  (yubing, 
literally  "surplus"  or  "reserve"  soldiers).68  These  apprentice  soldiers  served  as 
auxiliaries;  apparently  not  all  companies  had  them  in  sufficient  numbers. 
The  documents  of  the  Gold  River  campaign  provide  for  a  particular  number 
of  hired  labourers  per  hundred  soldiers,  which  was  higher  (eighty)  if  those 
soldiers  had  no  "apprentice  soldiers",  and  lower  (fifty)  if  they  had.69 

The  troops  of  the  Green  Standard  Army  were  reimbursed  for  the  same 
items  during  war  as  the  Banner  troops,  but  at  a  much  lower  rates.  Baggage 
pay,  for  example  for  a  cavalry  soldier  of  the  Green  Standards,  was  10  taels, 
for  infantry  troops  6  taels,  for  a  provincial  Banner  cavalry  soldier  20  taels, 
for  a  provincial  Banner  infantry  or  artillery  soldier  15  taels.  Elite  Banner 
soldiers  from  the  capital  were  given  30  taels,  yet  native  soldiers  received 
only  3  taels.  Part  of  the  reason  for  this  was  that  native  troops  normally  were 
locals  and  did  not  have  to  cover  a  large  distance  to  reach  the  war  theatre. 
The  salt-and-vegetable  pay  and  the  daily  provision  of  rice  were  equal  for 
soldiers  of  all  types  of  troops  and  for  all  ranks.  A  colonel  was  not  given  more 
to  eat  than  a  common  soldier.70  If  he  wanted  to  eat  better,  he  had  to  pay  for 
this  from  his  salary. 

66  According  to  Shepherd,  Statecraft  and  Political  Economy  on  the  Taiwan  Frontier,  pp.  94-96, 
30  per  cent  of  the  harvest  was  to  be  paid  to  the  public  treasury  for  the  first  three  years,  and 
thereafter  was  to  be  taxed  regularly.  Ploughs  and  seeds  were  provided  for  by  the  government. 

67  Ibid.,  p.  103. 

68  Luo,  Laying  bingzhi,  p.  231. 

69  Dai,  "The  Qing  State,  Merchants,  and  the  Military  Labour  Force  in  the  Jinchuan  Campaigns", 
P-45- 

70  Compare  Junxu  zeli,  Hubu  junxu  zeli,  chs  1-3. 


372 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


Another  important  issue  is  that  the  baggage  pay  for  the  Green  Standard 
troops  was  granted  without  conditions:  the  troops  did  not  have  to  pay  it 
back.  For  the  Banner  troops,  it  was  usual  in  some  provinces,  at  least  nomi- 
nally, that  the  troops  had  to  pay  back  the  baggage  pay  after  the  campaign. 
In  the  beginning,  this  seems  to  have  been  the  common  procedure,  but  over 
the  course  of  time  it  became  customary  that  the  emperor,  after  a  victorious 
campaign,  waived  the  back  payment  and  bestowed  upon  the  troops  the 
baggage  pay  ex  post  as  a  gift.  According  to  the  early  local  regulations  for 
war  expenditures  and  the  later  nationwide  code  for  them,  this  was  actually 
against  customary  usage,  although  there  were  also  some  precedents  for 
such  a  practice  in  earlier  wars.  Yet  the  necessity  to  keep  the  troops  in  a  state 
of  permanent  alertness  for  campaigning,  and  the  desire  of  the  Qianlong 
emperor  to  foster  his  most  trusted  and  most  efficient  military  units,  the 
Manchu  Banners,  led  to  the  custom  that  baggage  pay  was  a  grant  regardless 
of  the  legal  situation.  In  other  words,  while  in  the  early  Qing  period  it  was 
the  duty  of  a  soldier  to  make  ready  his  equipment  and  to  bring  it  to  the  site 
of  military  operations,  the  professional  soldiers  of  the  mid  Qing  period 
were  well  paid  (baggage  pay  corresponded  to  one  year's  wages)  for  their 
active  service. 

As  Dai  Yingcong  has  pointed  out,  the  Qing  state  experimented  with 
a  large  contingent  of  wage  labourers  in  the  first  and  second  Gold  River 
wars.  These  porters,  workers,  and  militia  were  recruited  first  from  the 
local  population,  sometimes  including  women  and  children,  in  completely 
free  arrangements  or  as  part  of  the  corvee  these  people  owed  to  their  local 
officials  or  chieftains  (in  case  of  the  native  ethnic  groups)  who  had  pledged 
allegiance  to  the  Qing.  In  the  latter  case,  one  can  speak  of  a  kind  of  indirect, 
but  paid,  corvee  service.  In  ancient  China,  three  types  of  taxes  had  been 
paid:  grain  (the  men's  duty),  textiles  (produced  by  the  women),  and  corvee 
labour  for  the  construction  of  dams,  dykes,  official  buildings,  tomb  mounds, 
or  -  most  famously  -  the  Great  Wall.  In  the  sixteenth  century,  the  system 
of  corvee  labour  was  finally  abolished.  However,  the  household  and  tax 
registers  were  still  an  important  source  informing  the  government  about 
the  potential  labour  force  of  the  population.  If  needed,  labourers  could  be 
drafted  based  on  the  tax  registers  but,  unlike  before,  their  work  had  to  be 
paid  adequately  with  wages,  which  were  regulated,  but  at  least  near  the 
market  price.  For  instance,  the  repair  of  dams  was  still  done  by  labourers 
recruited  from  the  peasant  population,  but  they  were  paid,  as  were  those 
who  carried  rice  to  the  camps  in  the  war  theatre.  The  latter  were  recruited 
from  the  villages,  marched  to  a  predefined  logistics  station,  and  carried 
rice  from  one  station  to  the  next  in  a  kind  of  relay  system.  The  difference 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


373 


between  the  Gold  River  campaign  and  other  wars  is  that  the  first  as  well 
as  the  second  campaign  resulted  in  static  warfare  in  which  troops  had  to 
be  provided  with  rice  over  a  long  period  of  time.  The  recruited  peasants, 
although  paid,  had  to  return  to  their  fields,  otherwise  the  grain  yield,  and 
consequently  the  tax  yield,  of  the  district  would  decline.  Labourers  deserted 
in  droves,  even  when  they  were  allowed  to  return  home  after  three,  later 
five,  months  of  service.  The  only  way  to  keep  them  at  their  work  was  to  pay 
them  much  more  than  the  nominal  2.4  taels  a  month,  plus  a  free  daily  rice 
ration.  Labour  cost  for  porterage  in  the  steep  mountain  paths  of  the  Gold 
River  region  skyrocketed  (by  a  multiple  of  up  to  five). 

The  managers  of  the  logistics  apparatus  had  discovered  that  with  such 
prices  it  was  equally  costly  to  have  a  private  entrepreneur  commissioned 
with  the  rice  transport.  The  entrepreneur  would  then  supervise  the  re- 
cruitment and  the  replacement  of  deserters.  The  entrepreneurs  did  not 
have  access  to  the  tax  registers,  but  recruited  their  labourers  in  the  labour 
market.  Immigration  into  the  province  of  Sichuan  and  the  increase  in  the 
local  population  had  led  to  a  growing  surplus  in  the  labour  force  in  the 
eighteenth  century.  The  chance  to  earn  some  money  in  the  war  logistics 
process  even  attracted  people  to  immigrate  into  the  respective  provinces. 
When  the  war  was  over,  the  porters  were  set  free  again,  leading  to  all  the 
social  complications  that  widespread  unemployment  causes. 71  The  porters 
recruited  by  the  government,  as  well  as  those  hired  by  private  shippers 
were  short-term  employees,  some  in  a  contract  with  the  government,  others 
with  a  private  merchant.  In  the  second  case,  there  were  no  restrictions 
upon  ethnicity  or  gender,  but  in  the  first  case,  the  government  recruited 
only  registered  males.  There  was,  nevertheless,  the  possibility  of  having 
somebody  else  take  over  the  duty  to  carry  the  rice.  There  were  also  rice 
porters  from  the  native  tribes  who  were  mainly  used  on  the  paths  of  the  high 
plateau.  If  employed  by  the  Qing  government,  they  were  also  regularly  paid 
and  given  a  daily  ration  in  barley  but,  if  delivering  corvee  (in  the  old  sense  as 
part  of  the  tax  liability)  to  their  chieftain,  they  seem  not  to  have  been  paid. 

The  Banner  garrisons  had  a  certain  number  of  regularly  employed  profes- 
sional craftsmen,  such  as  arrow-makers,  bow-makers,  blacksmiths,  bronze- 
smiths,  musket-makers,  saddlers,  and  ship's  carpenters.  The  most  important 
of  these  artisans  were  the  bow-  and  arrow-makers  and  the  blacksmiths. 


71  Dai,  "The  Qing  State,  Merchants,  and  the  Military  Labour  Force  in  the  Jinchuan  Campaigns", 
PP-  58-59- 


374 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


They  were,  similarly  to  the  menservants,  called  jiangyi,  "craft  labourers".72 
As  an  integral  part  of  the  army  (called  "official  labourers",  guanyi),  they 
could  be  called  specialist  troops,  especially  if  entrusted  to  build  palisades, 
wooden  bridges,  or  pontoon  bridges,  or  casting  cannons  in  field  foundries. 
Since  many  of  them  had  to  operate  with  a  number  of  specialized  tools 
and  implements,  they  were  given  a  baggage  pay  of  no  less  than  10  taels. 
Physicians  were  even  entitled  to  a  certain  number  of  menservants. 

The  Green  Standard  Armies  did  not  have  "official  craftsmen"  in  their 
garrisons.  The  production  of  weapons  was  done  by  craftsmen  on  the  private 
market.  During  war,  when  there  was  a  need  for  new  sabres,  swords,  dag- 
gers, halberds,  and  all  the  fantastic  range  of  polearms  the  Chinese  used, 
blacksmiths  were  hired  to  produce  new  arms.  The  cost  for  the  production 
of  arms  was  fixed  locally  and  could  be  reclaimed  according  to  certain 
rules  about  the  lifespan  and  the  overhaul  of  weapons.73  The  cost  lists  also 
included,  besides  the  material  cost,  an  entry  for  the  labour  cost.  Craftsmen 
of  all  types  who  were  hired  to  serve  the  army  in  a  campaign  were  treated 
quite  generously.  They  were  paid  a  baggage  allotment  which  was  geared 
to  the  distance  to  the  war  theatre  (between  5  and  6  taels).  Such  craftsmen 
could  also  be  granted  a  family  allowance  (anjiayin,  literally  "money  to 
appease  the  family")  if  living  far  away.  On  the  way  to  their  destination,  they 
were  paid  a  certain  daily  sum  of  money  to  buy  food  (0.06  taels),  and  outside 
the  borders  given  1  litre  of  rice.  On  the  spot  where  the  craftsmen  had  to 
work,  they  were  paid  monthly  sums  between  2  and  3  taels,  depending  on 
the  physical  demands  of  the  work.  Tailors,  map-makers,  wood-cutters,  ship's 
carpenters,  and  blacksmiths  were  paid  less  than  cannon-casters.  Both  the 
men  and  their  families  at  home  were  given  daily  allowances  of  1  litre  of  rice. 
Yet  these  regulations  became  valid  on  a  national  level  only  during  the  late 
1770s.  Previously,  the  regulations  concerning  their  pay  differed  widely  from 
province  to  province.  Most  of  the  specialists  were  hired  for  a  longer  period, 
at  least  several  months.  Otherwise  their  deployment  cost  would  have  been 
too  high.  References  to  physicians  are  very  scarce,  but  it  is  known  that  they 
could  either  be  recruited  from  the  population  or  come  from  the  Imperial 
Academy  of  Medicine.  The  members  of  the  latter  presumably  treated  only 


72  As  in  genyi,  and  as  noted  above,  the  word_y/  is  derived  from  the  designation  of  old,  unpaid 
corvee  labour. 

73  Junqizeii  (1791  edn),  in  Gugong zhenben  congkan,  293  (Haikou,  2000):  see  regulations  for  the 
weapons  of  each  particular  garrison. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


375 


the  emperor  or  princes  when  out  in  the  field,  but  not  normal  officers,  and 
even  less  the  common  soldiers.74 

Civilian  officials  played  an  important  role  in  the  organization  of  the 
logistics  behind  the  battle  lines.  Naturally,  they  were,  like  the  professional 
soldiers,  paid  their  normal  salary,  but  also  received  baggage  pay,  salt-and- 
vegetable  pay,  and  daily  provisions  of  rice.  As  with  the  soldiers  at  the  front, 
an  excellent  performance  of  their  duties  could  result  in  rewards  or  even 
promotions.  Yet  service  in  the  logistics  branch  was  not  a  very  popular  task 
for  someone  who  normally  lived  in  a  mansion  in  the  district  capital,  for 
example,  as  a  district  magistrate.  During  wartime,  they  were  obliged  to 
leave  the  city  where  they  were  appointed  and  move  to  a  logistics  station 
somewhere  on  the  way  to  the  war  theatre.  Civilian  officials  had  to  oversee 
logistics  stations,  and  the  number  of  stations  they  were  responsible  for 
depended  on  their  official  rank.  Since  it  was  not  a  very  popular  task,  the 
logistics  lines  were  mostly  put  into  the  hand  of  newly  qualified  officials 
who  had  passed  the  state  examinations  but  had  not  yet  been  appointed  to  a 
post.  They  were,  during  that  time,  not  given  a  salary  and  did  their  job  in  the 
hope  of  being  moved  up  in  the  line  of  waiting  officials  and  being  selected  for 
appointment  somewhat  earlier  than  average.  Another  group  of  officials  who 
served  without  monetary  pay  in  logistics  were  those  who  had  been  demoted 
because  of  some  offence.  They  were  virtually  enslaved  and  redeemed  their 
offence  (shuzui)  with  unpaid  service  in  an  unpopular  position.  Even  very 
high  officials  could  be  degraded  to  service  in  the  military  supply  without 
financial  payment,  as  the  case  of  the  previous  governor-general  of  Sichuan, 
Artai,  during  the  second  Gold  River  campaign  shows.  The  proportion  of 
civilian  officials  to  troops  was,  in  the  case  of  this  war,  about  7:i,ooo.75 

Depending  on  who  led  the  campaign,  a  whole  entourage  of  civilian 
officials  of  the  central  government  could  participate,  such  as  physicians, 
astronomers,  members  of  princely  households,  scribes,  secretaries,  transla- 
tors, edict  drafters,  members  of  the  ministries  (the  Censorate,  the  Court  of 
Imperial  Sacrifices,  Imperial  Entertainments,  Judicial  Review),  and  so  on. 
All  of  them  were  granted  baggage  pay,  salt-and-vegetable  pay,  daily  rations, 
and  a  fixed  number  of  beasts  of  burden. 

The  highest-ranking  civilian  members  of  the  central  government  who 
took  part  in  campaigns  were  generals  and  marshals.  This  sentence  must  be 
stressed,  because  it  points  out  the  very  important  issue  of  the  "amphibious"76 

74  Junxu  zeli,  Hubu  junxu  zeli,  ch.  6. 

75  Theobald,  "The  Second Jinchuan  Campaign",  pp.  136, 142. 

76  Dai  Yingcong,  unpublished  manuscript  on  the  functions  of  civilian  officials  in  warfare. 


376 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


character  of  the  Bannermen.  As  members  of  the  Banners,  officials  in  the 
State  Council  or  the  Grand  Secretariat  were  either  by  definition  or  by  nature 
soldiers.  However,  if  there  was  no  war,  they  acted  in  civilian  positions  and 
performed  civilian  duties  like  those  of  salt  supervisors,  supervisors  of  the 
Imperial  Canal,  censors,  provincial  judges,  or  governors.  The  entirety  of  the 
military  forces  dispatched  to  the  battlefield  was  normally  commanded  by 
a  governor-general.  Yet  if  the  campaign  was  so  large  that  troops  from  other 
provinces  were  involved,  command  had  to  be  assumed  by  a  member  of  the 
central  government,  such  as  a  grand  minister  commander  (jingliie  dachen) 
or  a  grand  minister  consultant  (canzan  dachen),  and  the  respective  persons 
transmuted  back  into  real  soldiers. 

The  bureaucracy  of  the  Qing  Empire  thus  involved  many  parts  of  the 
population  and  employed  them  for  the  purposes  of  war.  In  this  respect, 
warfare  was  regarded  as  an  aspect  to  be  administered  not  very  differently 
from  any  other  day-to-day  affair.  At  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century,  all 
financial  aspects  of  warfare  were  regulated  bureaucratically,  including 
the  wartime  allowances  of  professional  troops  and  the  labour  corps.  The 
amounts  the  state  would  spend  on  baggage  pay,  food,  special  clothing  for 
specialists,  family  allowances,  labour  pay,  and  allowances  on  days  when 
labourers  were  not  working  were  regulated.  Yet  it  is  not  known  if  the  sums 
listed  in  the  regulations  corresponded  to  the  real  pay  the  labourers  received. 
In  many  cases  it  might  have  been  more,  in  order  to  induce  them  to  remain 
in  the  job,  but  in  other  cases  less,  since  a  high  rate  of  unemployment  might 
have  forced  military  labourers  to  accept  lower  wages.  In  the  first  case  the 
officials  in  control  of  logistics  would  have  to  find  the  extra  money  to  pay 
the  labourers.  In  the  second  case,  they  could  embezzle  a  part  of  the  funds 
allotted  to  the  payment  of  the  labour  corps. 

The  1790s  mark  the  point  from  which  the  dynasty  could  no  longer  cope 
with  the  rebellions  in  the  interior  with  Banner  troops  and  Green  Standards 
alone.  During  the  uprising  of  the  White  Lotus  (c.  1790-1805),  an  originally 
religious,  later  overtly  political,  group  that  harboured  strong  anti-Manchu 
feelings,77  the  use  of  militia  or  "local  corps"  (tuanlian)  to  keep  the  insur- 
rectionists out  of  the  villages  and  prevent  the  villagers  from  joining  their 
numbers,  was  introduced  by  representatives  of  the  local  elites.  In  Philip 
Kuhn's  analysis,  in  the  militia  system  of  the  middle  of  the  nineteeth  cen- 
tury, two  strands  of  intentions  and  motivations  were  blended  together: 
the  bureaucratic  efforts  to  keep  control  over  the  countryside  and  a  kind 
of  "natural"  and  more  spontaneous  militarization  implemented  by  local 


77   Kuhn,  Rebellion  and  Its  Enemies  in  Late  Imperial  China,  p.  38. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


377 


elites  trying  to  defend  their  property  and  communities.78  Therefore,  the 
militia  structures  were  complex,  since  this  was  not  a  case  of  one  centralized 
dynastic  army,  and  norms  set  by  regional  and  local  administrations  would 
typically  differ  in  their  realization  in  situ.  Levels  of  armament,  fortification, 
and  professionalization  could  vary  widely,  depending  on  leadership  and 
funding,  both  of  which  were  organized  locally  by  the  elites.  Co-operation 
between  individual  militia  corps  was  possible,  and  the  more  complex  the 
corps  was,  the  better  the  options  for  funding  and  professionalization.  While 
on  the  lowest  level,  and  from  the  perspective  of  the  local  bureaucracy,  an 
element  of  conscription  or  at  least  obligation  prevailed,  the  larger  corps 
could  hire  mercenaries,  the  so-called  braves  (yong).  If  funds  permitted, 
these  professionals  usually  were  provided  with  better  weapons.79  Kuhn 
cites  an  example  of  a  complex  militia  corps  near  the  city  of  Canton  which 
consisted  of  more  than  10,000  hired  mercenaries  and  which  could  mobilize, 
if  needed,  a  "reserve"  force  of  several  tens  of  thousands  in  the  villages.80  It 
was  active  in  the  1840s,  when  it  operated  against  the  British  in  the  First 
Opium  War. 

While  the  White  Lotus  insurrection  was  subdued  with  the  efforts  of 
Banner  Armies,  Green  Standards,  and  militias,  militarization  on  a  higher 
professional  level,  which  had  already  set  in  earlier,  was  institutionalized 
in  the  course  of  the  next  great  challenge,  the  Taiping  rebellion.  This  was 
implemented  in  parallel  structures:  both  the  Taiping  army  and  the  provin- 
cial armies  were  organized  along  similar  lines,  according  to  the  degree  of 
militarization,  as  conceptualized  by  Kuhn  (see  Table  12.1). 


Table  12.1  Parallel  military  hierarchies  in  central  and  southern  China,  by  descending  order 
of  level  of  militarization 


Orthodox 

Heterodox 

The  regional  army 

The  community  in  arms 

Yong  (mercenaries) 

Gu  (bandits) 

Tuanlian  (local  militia) 

Tang  (secret  society  lodge) 

Source:  Kuhn,  Rebellion  and  Its  Enemies  in  Late  Imperial  China,  p.  166. 

The  next  large  insurrection  was  a  movement  with  its  beginnings  during  the 
First  Opium  War,  1838-1842.  At  the  start,  the  Taiping  organized  themselves 


78  Ibid.,  p.  64. 

79  Ibid.,  p.  69. 

80  Ibid.,  p.  70. 


378 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


as  military  formations  that  were  similar  to  those  of  the  militia.  In  Nanjing, 
where  the  entire  Banner  garrison  population  was  wiped  out,  they  estab- 
lished one  army  for  each  of  their  leaders,  but  created  no  single  Taiping  army 
under  unified  command.81  The  original  eight  Taiping  corps  and  regiments 
included  about  30,000  men.82  When  the  Taiping  rebels  reached  Nanjing  in 
1853,  they  were  estimated  at  about  2  million  people.83  Basically,  the  entire 
Taiping  population  was  organized  in  military  units,  and  units  of  female 
combatants  existed  as  well.84 

In  reaction  to  the  great  danger  of  the  anti-Manchu  and  anti-Confucian 
Taiping  insurrection,  which  threatened  the  interests  of  the  local  elites 
whenever  they  passed  on  their  trek  to  Nanjing  and  later  to  Beijing,  provincial 
elites  wove  together  individual  militia  groups  to  form  large  armies.  Their 
structure  was  similar  to  that  of  the  Taiping  armies.85  Their  soldiers  were 
not  confined,  like  the  militia,  to  defence  in  their  native  or  nearby  localities. 
Furthermore,  not  the  available,  but  specifically  the  able  men  were  recruited 
from  the  local  peasantry.  The  pay  was  said  to  be  four  times  higher  than  that 
of  the  "regular  army",  and  the  soldiers  actually  received  it,  which  often  was 
not  the  case  in  the  standing  army.86  The  financial  support  came  largely  from 
the  provincial  sources,  not  from  the  central  government.  A  particularity  of 
these  armies  was  that  personal  command  played  a  decisive  role.  In  contrast 
to  the  Green  Standard  Armies,  where  the  higher-echelon  officers  were  not 
supposed  to  work  in  their  own  home  regions,87  the  soldiers  at  the  level  of 
the  battalion  (500  men)  were  expected  to  maintain  personal  loyalty  to  their 
commander.  Battalions  could  be  given  the  personal  name  of  their  leaders, 
and  if  due  to  death  or  retirement  this  officer  was  no  longer  in  command, 
rather  than  replacing  him,  the  unit  was  dissolved  and  had  to  be  replaced  by 
a  newly  recruited  one.88  Likewise,  the  armies  owed  loyalty  to  their  found- 
ers, with  whom  they  were  identified:  for  instance,  Zeng  Guofan  and  Zuo 
Zongtang  with  their  Hunan  armies,  Li  Hongzhang  with  the  Anhui  army, 
and  Yuan  Shikai  with  the  Beiyang  army.  This  was  so  prevalent  that  Luo 


81  Michael,  "Military  Organization  and  Power  Structure  of  China",  p.  477. 

82  Ibid.,  p.  476.  Kuhn,  "The  Taiping  Rebellion",  p.  273,  quotes  a  figure  of  some  20,000  bye.  1850. 

83  Kuhn  "The  Taiping  Rebellion",  p.  275. 

84  Ibid.,  p.  276. 

85  Michael,  "Military  Organization  and  Power  Structure  of  China",  p.  478. 

86  Ibid. 

87  Ibid.,  p.  472. 

88  Kuhn,  Rebellion  audits  Enemies  in  late  Imperial  China,  p.  148. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


379 


Ergang  captured  the  phenomenon  in  the  phrase  "bing  weijiang  you"  (the 
soldiers  belong  to  the  general).89 

The  last  phase  of  the  Qing  dynasty  after  the  defeat  of  the  Taiping  rebellion 
in  1864  was  characterized  by  efforts  to  ward  off  foreign  intrusion  and  to 
quell  interior  rebellions  that  mushroomed  all  over  the  empire.  Provincial 
armies  were  deployed  for  the  latter  purpose.  Yet  for  the  former  aim  an 
invigorated  army  and  a  navy  under  central  command  seemed  necessary. 
For  this  reason,  attempts  were  made  in  1865  to  reform  part  of  the  Green 
Standards  that  were  stationed  in  the  vicinity  of  Beijing,  in  the  form  of  the 
"disciplined  forces"  (lianjun),  which  were  to  be  trained  in  western  military 
methods  by  Chinese  and  western  instructors,  and  equipped  with  modern 
and  unified  weaponry  and  uniforms.  They  were  to  be  organized  and  paid 
like  the  Anhui  and  Hunan  armies.  If  we  can  trust  western  observers,  this 
step  toward  an  army  reform  did  not  have  any  great  effect.  Rather,  it  was 
the  military  reforms  by  the  provincial  armies,  especially  the  modernization 
of  weapons,  ammunition,  and  military  methods,  which  had  convincing 
results.  The  Sino-Japanese  War  of  1894-1895  triggered  a  series  of  further 
attempts  at  military  modernization,  among  which  those  by  Zhang  Zhidong 
in  Hubei  and  by  Yuan  Shikai  in  the  northern  provinces  surrounding  the 
capital  were  most  successful  and  became  the  nuclei  of  the  private  armies 
of  Republican  warlords  in  the  twentieth  century.90 

Both  armies  were  known  for  good  and  regular  payment.91  The  north 
China  army,  which  was  established  in  1895,  was  in  fact  intended  as  a  first 
step  towards  a  centralized  army.  With  many  halts  and  hindrances  -  and 
the  Qing  dynasty  came  as  close  as  ever  to  abdication  in  the  course  of  the 
Boxer  uprising  (1900-1901)  -  a  systematic  army  reform  was  promulgated 
in  1905.  The  new  field  army  (Lujun)  was  tightly  modelled  on  the  Japanese 
army  and  stressed  not  only  the  education  of  officers,  but  also  the  qualifica- 
tions of  ordinary  soldiers.  Interestingly,  it  provided  for  a  kind  of  "voluntary 
conscription"  or  "selective  service",  so  that  the  idea  of  a  conscript  army  was 
fostered,  but  at  the  same  time  the  state  retained  the  right  to  select  the  most 
able  candidates.  Provision  was  made,  for  instance,  that  one-fifth  of  the 
enlisted  men  should  be  literate.92  Yet  ambiguity  remains  about  the  degree 
of  freedom  in  choosing  a  military  occupation.  As  an  American  military 
attache  reported,  localities  were  ordered  to  find  a  certain  number  of  men, 

89  Luo,  "Qingji  bing  weijiang  you  de  qiyuan". 

90  Powell,  The  Rise  of  Chinese  Military  Power,  p.  56. 

91  Ibid.,  p.  78. 

92  Ibid.,  p.  176. 


380 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


and  it  was  for  the  local  officials  to  decide  whom  to  choose.93  Furthermore, 
the  army  reform  provided  for  clear  command  structures  and  uniformity  of 
weapons  and  apparel,  and  had  a  clear  pay  scale  that  ranged  from  1,600  taels 
per  month  for  a  corps  commander  -  a  corps  was  to  include  1,595  officers, 
23,760  enlisted  men,  4,469  horses  and  mules,  108  cannons  -  to  a  monthly 
4.2  taels  for  privates.94  The  army  was  devised  as  a  reserve  army,  with  regular 
troops  and  first-  and  second-class  reserves,  as  in  European  armies.  Regulars 
were  to  serve  for  three  years;  after  their  regular  service,  first-class  reserves 
were  available  for  another  three  years,  and  second-class  reserves  for  four. 
The  reservists  of  the  first  class  were  to  be  paid  1  tael,  while  the  second-class 
reserve  men  received  half  a  tael  per  month,  except  when  on  active  duty.95 
The  plan  foresaw  that  in  the  course  of  seventeen  years  (by  1922)  the  Chinese 
Field  Army  was  to  include  thirty-six  divisions,  that  is,  more  than  400,000 
men. 

One  pressing  problem  it  did  not  solve  or  discuss  was  that  the  provinces 
still  had  more  control  over  their  divisions  within  the  Field  Army  than 
the  central  government,  because  they  financed  the  divisions  that  were 
stationed  in  their  regions.96  The  other  was  that  the  Eight  Banners  and  Green 
Standards  were  retained,  if  in  smaller  numbers.  Efforts  had  been  made  to 
train  and  drill  part  of  the  traditional  armies  in  western  ways,  but  change 
was  slow,  and  the  Manchu  central  government  was  not  prepared  to  give  up 
the  Banner  registration  for  good. 

The  numbers  of  the  diverse  armies  were  not  precisely  known  to  anybody, 
and  the  estimates  vary  widely,  not  only  for  the  absolute  number  of  men 
employed,  but  also  for  those  who  would,  in  the  case  of  war,  be  able  to  actively 
defend  the  country.  On  the  eve  of  the  1911  revolution,  when  a  military  mutiny 
ended  more  than  two  thousand  years  of  imperial  rule,  the  numbers  of  the 
various  armies  were  given  as  shown  in  Table  12.2. 


93  Ibid.,  p.  235. 

94  Ibid.,  p.  178. 

95  Ibid. 

96  Ibid.,  p.  268. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA  381 


Table  12.2  Troop  strengths  of  Qing  armies  around  1900 


Army 

Number  of  men 

Variant  estimates 

(official  figures. 

(rounded  up)** 

rounded  up)* 

Patrol  and  defence 

334,000 

French  General  Staff  1908:216,000; 

troops,  Fangying 

US  military  attache  1909: 157,000; 

(refers  to  the  provincial 

China  Year  Book  1912: 277,000 

armies) 

Banner  Army,  Qiying 

263,000 

1911: 255,000  men,  of  which  38,000 
trained  in  the  Lujun;  37,000  trained 
in  the  patrol  and  defence  troops 
or  comparable  units;  the  remain- 
ing two-thirds  untrained  or  of  no 
military  value 

Green  Standards, 

133,000 

It  is  doubtful  whether  they  could 

Luying 

have  mustered  more  than  50,000 
men 

New  Army,  Lujun 

286,000 

Total 

1,016,000 

Between  748,000  and  807,000 

Sources: 

*  Shen,  "Xinhai  geming  qianxi  woguozhi  lujun  ji  qi  junfei",  p.  140 

**  Powell,  The  Rise  of  Chinese  Military  Power  in  Late  Imperial  China,  p.  295. 


Trends  over  time 

In  the  context  of  the  Fighting  for  a  Living  project,97  the  trends  over  time 
need  to  be  interpreted  by  a  six-layer  matrix.  In  this  matrix  changes  over  time 
in  six  determinants  of  labour  conditions  and  relations  are  described  and 
correlated  with  each  other.  These  determinants  are,  first,  technology  (hard 
and  soft  skills,  such  as  technology  of  weapons  and  machinery,  techniques 
of  recruitment,  or  the  inner  structure  of  the  army);  secondly,  political  and 
socio-economic  disruptions  (often  caused  by  war);  thirdly,  economic  and 
financial  factors  (such  as  availability  of  funds  or  the  rise  of  a  monetized  mar- 

97  Erik-Jan  Ziircher,  "Fighting  for  a  Living:  Origins,  Practices  and  Consequences  of  Different 
Forms  of  Military  Employment  in  Europe,  the  Middle  East  and  Asia  (1500-2000)",  revised  position 
paper  for  the  Collaboratory  "Fighting  for  a  Living",  p.  2,  https://projects.iisg.nl/web/fighting-for- 
a-living/results  (accessed  10  July  2013). 


382 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


ket  economy);  fourthly,  demographic  factors  (such  as  the  sudden  availability 
of  new  populations  or  a  decline  in  population  growth);  fifthly  conditions 
of  supply  and  demand  of  labour  (such  as  the  army's  competition  with  other 
employers  for  labour);  and,  finally,  ideological  factors  (such  as  ideas  on  the 
suitability  of  military  labour,  or  the  ideal  of  nation-building  as  a  common 
cause).  Instead  of  presenting  a  matrix  with  quantitative,  binary  (yes/no) 
elements  in  which  those  determinants  are  described  as  "chronological 
vectors",  we  prefer  a  qualitative  description  by  which  the  particular  scalar 
sizes  and  their  change  over  time  can  be  much  better  specified.  The  following 
large  changes  in  labour  relations  in  the  Chinese  military  can  be  observed  in 
the  cross-section  years  1650, 1800,  and  1900.  These  are  sample  years  which 
the  Global  Collaboratory  on  the  History  of  Labour  Relations  chose  for  the 
comparative  analysis  of  labour  relations  worldwide.98 

The  takeover  of  the  imperial  reign  by  the  Manchus  resulted  in  a  transi- 
tion around  1650  from  the  Ming  corvee  military  service  to  the  mercenary 
Green  Standard  Army,  or  -  roughly  -  from  tributary  to  commodified  labour, 
with  all  the  intermediary  phases  explained  by  David  M.  Robinson  in  his 
contribution  in  this  volume,  "Military  Labor  in  China,  c.  1500".  It  remains 
to  be  discussed  whether  the  transition  from  tributary  conscripted,  to  com- 
modified mercenary  military  labour  is  a  process  that  occurred  between 
1500  and  1650,  or  whether  mercenary  labour  was,  already  by  1600,  so  firmly 
established  that  no  actual  conscription  occurred  at  all. 

The  ethnic  composition  of  the  conquest  elite  made  the  new  formation 
of  the  Eight  Banners  necessary.  With  focus  on  the  Manchus,  this  can  be 
analysed  as  a  transition  from  ethnic  tributary  to  polyethnic  tributary, 
which  in  the  late  eighteenth  century  comes  back  to  a  mono-ethnic  model 
(Manchus  only). 

For  the  supply  services  of  both  Eight  Banners  and  Green  Standards, 
there  was  a  rise  in  free  wage  labour  for  transport  and  specialist  tasks  that 
was  largely  organized  by  the  market.  This  constitutes  a  change  around 
1800  from  tributary  (as  a  tax  obligation  in  kind,  or  corvee)  to  commodified 
labour  remunerated  with  monetary  wages.  Wars,  especially  those  against 
insurgents,  were  increasingly  organized  by  the  local  governments  in  the 
districts.  The  organizational  complexity  of  the  labour  corps  decreased 
because  of  shorter  distances  and  diminished  need  for  labour  services. 

Militia  and  mercenary,  proto-provincial  armies  took  over  defence 
tasks  from  the  Eight  Banners  and  especially  from  the  Green  Standards. 

98  See  ibid,  and  "Global  Collaboratory  on  the  History  of  Labour  Relations:  Results",  https:// 
collab.iisg.nl/web/labourrelations/results  (accessed  lojuly  2013). 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


383 


If  the  transition  from  Green  Standards  to  local  militia  is  considered,  this 
represents  a  change  from  commodified  to  tributary  labour,  since  the  local 
militia  troops  were  originally  conscripted  from  the  peasant  population.  The 
ensuing  transition  from  local  militia  to  provincial  armies  in  the  second  half 
of  the  nineteenth  century  reflects  a  change  from  tributary  to  commodified 
labour,  since  the  troops  were  mercenaries  hired  by  the  proto-warlords. 
Here,  change  lay  in  the  employing  institution  rather  than  in  the  labour 
relationship,  namely  the  two-stage  transition  from  the  central  government 
into  the  hands  of  the  localities  and  then  to  the  provinces. 

At  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century,  a  transition  occurred  from  corn- 
modified  labour  in  the  lifelong  mercenary  Green  Standards,  and  from 
tributary  labour  in  the  Eight  Banners  to  de  facto  professional  armies  that 
were,  however,  established  with  the  intention  of  introducing  conscription. 
In  actuality,  the  conscription  was  carried  out  in  ways  different  from  those 
envisaged.  Rather  than  calling  up  all  able-bodied  male  citizens  to  duty, 
localities  decided  how  to  fill  their  quotas  and,  in  case  of  emergencies,  took 
recourse  to  conscription.  The  transition  back  from  provincial  to  imperial 
employment,  which  the  newly  established  Ministry  of  War  had  hoped  for, 
was  not  fulfilled. 

Explanations  for  transitions  in  the  matrix  of  hypotheses 

The  matrix  of  hypotheses  for  the  explanation  of  change  in  military  labour 
relations  developed  by  the  Collaboratory  Fighting  for  a  Living  project 
provides  for  six  options.  In  the  following,  we  discuss  which  of  these  fac- 
tors carried  the  most  weight  in  the  given  cross-section  years.  Before  going 
into  details,  it  is  necessary  to  stress  the  very  long-term  trend  of  increasing 
monetization  in  China  between  1500  and  1900.  Its  beginnings  are  discussed 
in  Robinson's  contribution,  which  also  makes  clear  that  "tributary"  labour 
could  be  remunerated  with  regular  stipends  and  additional  gifts  and  grants. 
Monetization  certainly  played  a  major  role  in  the  rise  of  hired  military 
labour  over  conscript  labour.  Nevertheless,  tributary  military  labour  in 
China  was  not  confined  to  conscription  and,  given  the  further  increase 
in  population  between  the  sixteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries,  the  high 
amount  of  labour  freely  available  for  the  military  did  not  necessitate  the 
use  of  conscription. 


384 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


Why  did  labour  relations  in  military  work  change? 

Military  technology,  with  respect  to  both  "hardware"  (that  is,  weaponry  and 
armour)  and  "software"  (in  the  sense  of  military  skills),  did  not  significantly 
influence  change  around  1650  from  tributary  to  professional  labour  rela- 
tions, and  thus  the  change  from  Ming  hereditary  military  households  to 
Green  Standards,  or  from  the  rise  of  the  new  tributary  labour  relations  in 
the  Banners.  Muskets  and  cannons  were  used,  as  before,  yet  the  Manchus 
particularly  valued  the  skills  of  mounted  archers  and  considered  bows  and 
arrows  as  genuinely  Manchu  weapons.  Banners  armies  (hence  the  tributary 
rather  than  the  mercenary  type  of  military  occupation)  were  seen  as  elite 
troops  mainly  deployed  for  the  great  conquest  wars  in  the  border  zones.  In 
the  initial  phase  of  the  naval  campaigns  between  the  Ming  or  Ming  loyalists 
and  the  Qing,  the  former  had  a  decisive  technological  edge  over  the  latter. 
However,  also  from  this  perspective  the  identification  of  the  naval  officers 
and  mariners  with  the  Han  Chinese  rather  than  the  "foreign"  Manchus 
determined  whether  people  would  join  the  Zheng  or  the  Qing  navy. 

By  1800,  gradual  change  had  occurred  in  the  supply  services,  in  the  form 
of  a  shift  from  tributary  corvee  to  commodified  hired  modes  of  employ- 
ment. As  far  as  skills  are  concerned,  the  characteristics  of  the  hired  form 
of  labour  included  the  possibility  of  finer  specialization,  since  experts  such 
as  cannon-casters  or  tent-makers  could  be  employed  for  the  conquest  wars. 
The  change  from  the  commodified  mercenary  labour  in  the  Green  Stand- 
ards to  the  tributary  modes  in  the  form  of  early  local  militia  organization 
were  brought  about  not  by  change  in  the  military  technology,  but  again 
in  the  field  of  skills  and  organization.  This  type  of  warfare,  which  was 
concentrated  in  the  rebellions  in  the  interior,  made  the  use  of  specialists 
and  elite  troops  seem  less  essential.  The  technological  level  of  the  troops 
decreased  generally  during  the  nineteenth  century  until  the  period  of  self- 
strengthening  and  military  modernization. 

By  1900,  change  from  the  mercenary  Green  Standards  to  professional, 
regional  armies  (which  did  not  bring  about  a  change  in  labour  relations) 
and  the  change  from  Banner  Armies  to  professional  armies  (which  certainly 
did  affect  the  labour  relations,  from  tributary  to  commodified)  were  in 
full  swing.  The  introduction  of  modern,  western-style  weaponry,  military 
drill,  and  command  structures  significantly  altered  the  relationship  of  the 
troops  to  their  employing  agency.  With  the  purchase  of  new  technology 
in  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  craftsmen  from  among  the 
population  were  either  incorporated  into  the  arsenals  or  became  suppliers, 
especially  in  ship-building.  The  general  trend  was  that  technical  expertise 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


385 


in  armaments  and  ammunition  was  more  and  more  integrated  into  the 
organization  of  the  modernized  mercenary  armies. 

War  and  the  ensuing  political  and  socio-economic  disruption  played 
a  role  in  the  change  in  military  labour  relations  as  well.  This  was  clearly 
the  case  in  the  integration  of  what  had  been  the  army  of  the  previous  rul- 
ers and  its  new  designation  as  the  Green  Standards,  which  represents  a 
commodified  type  of  labour  relation.  On  one  hand,  this  was  necessary  to 
bind  the  labour  force  to  the  new  rulers,  and  on  the  other  hand  because  the 
conquest  of  China  by  the  Manchus  called  for  a  specific  type  of  military 
unit,  consisting  of  Chinese  who  could  fight  against  their  compatriots  and 
neighbouring  peoples.  The  Manchu  population  was  far  too  small  to  take 
over  this  task,  and  the  Manchu  troops  with  their  cavalry  units  were  not 
appropriate  for  battles  in  many  parts  of  China.  The  conquest  war  of  China 
by  the  Manchus  was  thus  an  opportunity  to  reorganize  and  reinstitute  the 
previous  troops  of  the  Ming  dynasty  and  other  contenders. 

The  Manchus  were  a  conquest  elite  who  in  the  course  of  the  seventeenth 
century  gained  supreme  rule  over  the  majority  Chinese.  The  need  for  con- 
stant vigilance  of  "resident  aliens"99  made  them  garrison  their  own  people, 
and  maintain  and  foster  them  as  professionals  who  were  theoretically 
forbidden  to  seek  jobs  as  civilians.  Thus,  the  working  and  living  conditions 
of  those  in  the  garrisons,  rather  than  labour  relations,  were  modified  by  the 
eventual  victory  in  the  warfare  between  the  1630s  and  1683. 

The  large  conquest  wars  in  the  border  regions  in  the  late  seventeenth 
and  eighteenth  centuries  brought  about  a  change  in  labour  relations  since 
they  necessitated  the  quick  recruitment  of  labour  to  maintain  efficient 
logistical  operations.  Specialists  were  required  to  supply  labour,  expertise, 
and  materiel  to  the  military.  Tributary  labour  was  not  sufficient  to  meet 
the  demands  of  the  army,  so  that  labour  had  to  be  recruited  on  the  market 
instead  of  from  the  population  included  in  the  tax  registers. 

This  situation  changed  with  the  relocation  of  war  into  the  interior  of  the 
empire.  Military  operations  became  less  professionalized.  War  was  still 
an  omnipresent  phenomenon  in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
but  instead  of  elite  troops  fighting  against  enemies  with  the  same  level 
of  fighting  skills,  soldiers  fought  against  inferior  rebel  troops.  The  social 
problems  of  China's  growing  population  contributed  to  the  increasing 
internal  rebellions,  often  inspired  by  millenarian  religious  ideas. 

The  change  in  1900,  from  the  declining  Green  Standards  and  Banners  to 
professional  armies,  was  influenced  by  the  more  efficient  warfare  of  the 

99  Elliott,  The  Manchu  Way,  pp.  268-271. 


386 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


imperialist  powers.  This  stands  in  conjunction  with  a  greater  impact  of 
naval  warfare,  an  operational  theatre  that  had  been  de-emphasized  by  the 
Manchus  in  the  eighteenth  century.  Since  the  Opium  Wars,  the  Manchus 
lost  sovereignty  over  parts  of  their  territory.  These  losses  included,  for 
instance,  Hong  Kong  1842/1898,  the  international  concessions  in  the  treaty 
ports  since  1842,  Taiwan  1895,  the  Jiaozhou  Bay  (in  Shandong  province)  1897, 
Liishun/Port  Arthur  1898,  and  dependencies  in  North  Vietnam  (1884)  and 
the  Hi  River  Basin  in  today's  Xinjiang,  annexed  by  Russia  in  1871  and  partly 
restored  to  the  Qing  Empire  in  1881.  The  military  weakness  on  the  part  of 
the  central  government  drove  home  the  notion  of  how  urgent  military 
modernization  was  in  terms  of  both  armaments  and  military  skills.  Defeat 
in  war  was  thus  a  trigger  for  change  in  military  organization  that  also  had 
effects  on  labour  relations. 

The  perspective  of  economic  and  financial  factors  hinges  on  a  series 
of  interconnected  questions.  Was  the  availability  of  funds  the  cause  for 
warfare,  or  its  effect?  In  a  recent  study,100  Kuroda  Akinobu  cites  figures  sug- 
gesting that  in  a  comparison  of  the  Qing  and  the  British  Empires  in  1783, 
the  Chinese  treasury  possessed  a  surplus  of  about  six  times  its  yearly  tax 
income  of  that  year,  while  the  public  debt  of  the  British  Empire  amounted 
to  twenty  times  the  annual  tax  revenue  in  the  same  year.  According  to 
Kuroda's  account,  the  total  British  debts  amounted  to  an  equivalent  of 
twenty  times  the  yearly  expenditures  of  the  Chinese  state. 

This  implies  that  Chinese  emperors  and  officials  of  the  central  govern- 
ment harboured  the  idea  that  wars  could  be  waged  only  if  funds  were  suf- 
ficient. Again  and  again  the  Qianlong  emperor  persuaded  the  accountants 
of  the  Ministry  of  Revenue  (hubu)  that  there  were  sufficient  funds  in  the 
state  treasury  and  that  there  was  no  need  to  be  stingy  in  case  of  war.  Yet 
any  government  spending  had  to  be  set  off  against  the  revenues.101  Following 
John  Brewer's  persuasive  argumentation,  during  the  same  period,  the  British 
Empire  waged  wars,  for  instance  in  the  Seven  Years  War  and  the  American 
War  of  Independence,  in  order  to  gain  profit.  The  funds  to  wage  these  wars 
came  from  credits.102 

Kuroda  attributes  the  profit-oriented  type  of  warfare  to  the  fundamen- 
tally different  development  path  of  currency-dependent  versus  credit- 
dependent  societies.103  For  labour  relations,  the  question  is  how  the  wealth 

100  Kuroda,  "The  Eurasian  Silver  Century",  p.  269. 

101  Theobald,  "The  Second Jinchuan  Campaign",  pp.  333,  381-382,  386-388. 

102  Brewer,  The  Sinews  of  Power,  pp.  30,  39, 114-126. 

103  Kuroda,  "The  Eurasian  Silver  Century",  p.  268. 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


387 


of  the  Chinese  public  treasury  arrived  in  the  hands  of  those  working  in 
the  high-risk  group  of  military  labour,  and  whether  more  or  less  liquidity 
of  the  currency  influenced  the  way  in  which  soldiers  were  recruited  and 
employed.  Did  the  transition  from  tributary  labour  service,  which  was 
imposed  or  conferred  on  particular  households,  to  mercenary,  voluntary 
arrangements  coincide  with  greater  availability  of  monetary  means  to  pay 
the  soldiers  and  the  supporting  services?  In  other  words:  did  the  -  mostly 
non-monetary  -  tributary  labour  diminish,  or  was  it  altogether  abolished 
for  commodified  labour  arrangements,  when  money  to  pay  for  the  military 
wages  was  available  in  sufficient  amounts? 

The  cases  under  discussion  here  open  some  perspectives  on  these  ques- 
tions. We  see  in  the  transition  from  the  Ming  to  the  Qing  that  both  dynasties 
had  two  main  types  of  military  labour.  In  the  Ming,  this  was  hereditary 
registration  as  military  household,  and  therefore  legally  bound  and  unfree 
labour,  with  a  basic  arrangement  that  provided  land  for  the  soldiers.,  but  also 
wages.  The  labour  arrangements  for  the  mercenaries  (that  is,  soldiers  hired 
by  individual  commanders,  the  so-called  housemen)  were,  at  least  legally,  if 
not  in  actual  practice,  easier  to  change  or  leave  altogether.104  Thus  the  latter 
may  have  constituted  the  better  work  opportunity,  also  because  it  offered 
more  frequent  intervals  of  wage  payment  than  was  the  case  for  hereditary 
military  households.105  In  the  Qing,  the  tributary  kind  of  labour  relations 
was  not  inflicted  upon  the  Banner  people  as  an  onerous  obligation;  it  was 
instead  considered  a  privilege,  both  in  terms  of  payment  and  regarding  the 
social  and  status  assets  that  came  with  it.  The  more  commodified  military 
labour  in  the  Green  Standards  did  not  command  the  same  dignity,  nor 
was  the  remuneration  as  high  as  that  of  the  Banners.  As  we  have  seen,  the 
number  of  Green  Standards  may  have  been  about  three  times  as  high  as 
that  of  the  Banner  people.  This  shows  that,  from  the  perspective  of  the 
soldiers,  a  higher  commodification  of  labour  did  not  necessarily  lead  to  more 
desirable  and  better-rewarded  employment.  From  the  perspective  of  the 
state,  the  hereditary  character  of  the  positions  in  the  Banner  structure  made 
a  constant  supply  of  professional  troops  possible.  In  a  kind  of  paternalistic 
relationship,  the  state  would  care  for  its  elite  troops:  the  Banner  soldiers.  The 

104  See  Robinson's  contribution  in  this  volume,  "Military  Labor  in  China,  c.  1500",  especially 
where  he  points  out  that  housemen  could  take  on  their  employers'  surnames,  and  that  their 
status  was  vaguely  in  between  hired  labourers  and  family  members.  The  same  occurred  with 
bondservants  in  the  large  households  of  the  Yangzi  delta  in  the  late  Ming  period.  See  McDermott, 
"Bondservants  in  the  T'ai-hu  Basin  during  the  Late  Ming",  p.  679. 

105  As  Robinson  points  out,  in  comparison  to  the  regular  garrison  soldiers,  housemen  were 
privileged  in  regards  to  their  wages  and  other  prerogatives. 


388 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


permanent  availability  of  troops  ready  for  combat  was  important  enough 
to  finance  such  a  costly  group  of  specialists. 

For  the  supply  services  in  the  eighteenth  century  the  advisers  for  military 
finance  understood  that,  ultimately  hiring  people  from  the  labour  market 
was  neither  more  expensive  nor  more  difficult  to  organize  than  levying 
the  services  of  peasants  for  military  service  by  means  of  tax  registers.  One 
reason  was  that  the  involuntary  workers  often  absconded  and  had  to  be 
replaced.  In  a  similar  way  after  1800  it  may  have  superficially  seemed 
cheaper  to  recruit  peasant  military  service  for  bandit-suppression  militia 
than  to  sustain  a  professional  army  for  this  task.  Yet  the  problem  here  was 
that  militias  were  worse  trained,  poorly  equipped,  and  less  motivated  than 
the  provincial  armies  that  eventually  fought  the  bandits  and  rebels.  In 
order  to  achieve  specialization  of  skills  and  armament  for  defence  against 
internal  and  external  enemies,  nineteenth-  and  twentieth-century  military 
reformers  sought  to  attain  increases  in  military  budgets.  China's  defeats  in 
the  manifold  imperialist  challenges  of  the  nineteenth  century  are  largely 
attributed  to  a  lack  of  finances  for  military  modernization.  In  contrast, 
the  case  of  the  struggle  between  the  Nationalist  and  communist  armies 
in  the  1945  to  1949  civil  war  shows  that  the  military  modernization  of  the 
Nationalist  (Kuomintang)  army  did  not  suffice  if  motivation  of  the  soldiers 
and  credibility  of  the  commanders  were  lacking. 

The  demographic  factor  influenced  changes  in  military  labour  relations 
mainly  in  two  ways.  First,  with  the  Manchus,  a  new  population  became 
available  as  fighters  and  garrison  soldiers.  A  favourable  tributary  and  elite 
status  was  conferred  due  to  this  ethnic  self-definition.  Secondly,  the  period 
between  1650  and  the  end  of  the  Qing  was  one  of  population  growth,  with 
only  a  slight,  temporary  decline  in  the  middle  and  late  nineteenth  century. 
Both  the  military  and  its  supporting  services  gained  an  abundant  labour 
force  from  a  general  increase  in  China's  population.  This  made  conscription 
largely  unnecessary.  With  respect  to  the  tributary  labour  of  the  hereditary 
Banner  households,  this  increase  brought  about  a  situation  where  only  a 
minority  of  adult  males  could  be  engaged  in  military  service.  The  solu- 
tion to  the  economic  problem  of  supporting  the  Banners  was  to  lift  the 
ban  on  non-military  jobs  and  to  virtually  dissolve  the  Banners  in  the  late 
nineteenth  century. 

The  issue  of  competition  for  military  labour  between  the  regular  state 
army  and  other  "employers"  is  most  evident  in  the  last  phases  of  the  Ming 
and  the  Qing  dynasty,  as  actual  rivalry  arose  which  could  not  be  treated  as 
mere  peasant  rebellions  to  be  quelled  easily,  without  posing  serious  threats. 
In  1650,  such  competition  occurred  between  the  Ming-loyal  armies,  local 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


389 


rebel  leaders,  and  the  Qing  Banners  that  gradually  conquered  the  country 
from  north  to  south. 

Due  to  the  professed  intention  of  the  Qing  to  provide  a  better  livelihood 
for  their  subjects  than  the  preceding  Ming  dynasty  military  labour  relations 
changed  from  the  tributary  household  registration  system  of  the  Ming  to 
the  more  commodified  Green  Standards  in  the  Qing.  In  fact,  the  corvee 
obligations  were  also  gradually  abandoned  in  many  sectors  of  civilian 
occupations  for  the  state,  such  as  in  construction  or  textile  production, 
and  instead  the  workers  were  hired.  For  the  supporting  military  labour 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  the  permanent  long-distance  campaigns  to  the 
frontiers  required  a  large  labour  corps,  which  was  supplied  by  the  increasing 
population.  Around  1800,  the  demand  for  military  labour  forces  decreased, 
leading  to  rising  unemployment  in  border  provinces  such  as  Sichuan.  The 
more  militias  that  were  set  up,  the  less  the  regular  armies,  Green  Standards 
and  Banners,  were  occupied  with  campaigning,  leading  to  lower  motiva- 
tion, poor  training,  and  fewer  opportunities  to  earn  additional  income  by 
baggage  pay  and  financial  rewards  for  victories.  For  the  militia  troops,  the 
recruitment  of  peasants  for  military  service  may  have  provided  additional 
income  for  those  living  from  agriculture,  but  also  impeded  them  from 
engaging  in  their  main  occupation.  The  change  to  commodified  labour 
by  recruiting  the  unemployed  can  be  seen  as  an  inevitable  consequence 
of  the  first  attempts  to  apply  corvee  recruitment  to  cope  with  rebellions 
from  within. 

Finally,  the  factor  of  ideology,  especially  ideas  on  the  suitability  of  mili- 
tary labour,  and  the  ideal  of  nation-building,  also  becomes  perceptible  in 
periods  when  radical  change  took  place.  Around  1650,  this  was  the  accession 
to  power  by  the  Manchus,  who  defined  themselves  as  warriors  who  had 
inherited  the  "Mandate  of  Heaven"  and  thus  the  legitimacy  of  rule  over 
the  Chinese  despite  their  non-Han  descent.  This,  as  has  been  shown  in  the 
preceding  paragraphs,  favoured  a  tributary  kind  of  labour  relations.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  contending  defenders  of  the  Han  Chinese  Ming  dynasty 
could  mobilize  a  part  of  their  armed  forces  precisely  because  loyalty  to 
previous  rulers  formed  an  important  element  of  the  Confucian  state  ideol- 
ogy. It  is  hard  to  assess  whether  the  motivation  of  the  anti-Qing  fighters 
was  mainly  rejection  of  the  rulers  from  beyond  the  Great  Wall  or  actual 
loyalty  to  the  Ming.  The  voluntary  nature  of  the  arrangement,  at  least  in 
its  initial  phases,  probably  played  an  important  part  in  the  relatively  long- 
lasting  rule  of  the  Zheng  family.  At  the  end  of  the  Qing  dynasty,  the  idea  of 
nation-building  combined  with  rising  nationalism  with  racialist  undertones 
that  rejected  the  Manchus,  who  had  proved  inefficient  in  warding  off  both 


390 


CHRISTINE  MOLL-MURATA  AND  ULRICH  THEOBALD 


foreign  aggression  and  internal  challenges.  The  Manchu  self-image  of  being 
a  born  group  of  warriors  was  disrupted  by  the  warfare  of  the  mid-nineteenth 
century;  it  seemed  outdated  in  an  atmosphere  that  strove  for  nationalistic 
modernization. 

Conclusion 

As  a  result  of  the  discussion  of  possible  causes  for  change  in  military  labour 
relations,  we  have  seen  that  military  technology  war,  financial  and  economic 
factors,  demography,  supply  and  demand  of  labour,  and  ideology  all  had  an 
impact  on  military  occupations  between  1650  and  1900.  Yet  it  is  not  easy  to 
evaluate  their  impact  in  regard  to  the  labour  relations  in  question,  which 
are  of  a  tributary  or  commodified  nature.  The  tributary  mode  corresponds 
to  the  Ming  military  household  registration,  the  attempts  at  conscription  in 
the  Ming-loyal  interlude  of  the  Zheng  clan  in  the  1670s  and  early  1680s,  the 
Qing  Banners,  the  supporting  services  in  the  period  of  corvee  obligations 
before  the  expansionary  warfare  of  the  Qianlong  emperor,  and  the  militia 
in  the  early  nineteenth  century,  as  well  as  the  efforts  in  the  course  of  the 
1905  military  reforms  to  introduce  universal  conscription.  The  commodified 
mode  includes  the  initial  phase  of  the  Koxinga's  recruitments,  the  Green 
Standards,  the  nineteenth-century  provincial  armies,  and  the  New  Army. 
As  this  list  shows,  there  is  no  unilinear  trend  suggesting  that  tributary 
arrangements  necessarily  precede  commodified  labour  relations.  Rather, 
the  two  coexisted  for  long  periods  in  Chinese  history.  The  two  attempts 
at  conscription  originated  from  different  motivations.  The  first,  by  the 
Zhengs,  was  initiated  because  of  the  imminent  danger  from  a  formidable 
adversary  which  was  conquering  all  of  China.  Demographic  factors  stood 
in  conjunction  with  defections  from  Taiwan  to  the  mainland;  in  simple 
words:  not  enough  men  would  voluntarily  serve  the  cause  of  the  Zheng 
clan.  In  the  second  case,  universal  conscription  was  not  necessary  because 
enough  volunteers  were  willing  to  join  the  army,  if  it  could  pay.  It  is  only 
from  the  middle  of  the  twentieth  century  onward  that  both  the  Republic 
of  China  (after  the  exodus  to  Taiwan)  and  the  People's  Republic  of  China 
have  commenced  conscription  systems.  On  the  mainland,  this  is  realized 
as  a  selective  service  system;  on  Taiwan  the  draft  is  more  universal,  but  is 
in  the  process  of  being  lifted. 

A  perspective  on  the  present  situation  can  accentuate  the  fact  that  a 
change  in  military  labour  relations  is  a  complex,  multi-causal  event  that 
hinges  on  many  factors.  In  addition  to  the  factors  discussed,  what  needs  to 


MILITARY  EMPLOYMENT  IN  QING  DYNASTY  CHINA 


391 


be  taken  into  account  in  the  case  of  Qing  China,  especially  in  the  nineteenth 
century,  and  up  until  the  foundation  of  the  People's  Republic  of  China, 
is  the  tension  between  centralization  and  particularism.  Superficially, 
even  if  labour  relations  do  not  seem  to  change  and  (apparently)  remained 
commodified,  there  are  political  aspects  during  the  Republican  era  which 
affected  the  equation.  It  made  a  big  difference  for  the  command  structures 
within  the  armies,  the  loyalty  of  the  soldiers,  and  regularity  of  payment 
whether  the  employer  was  the  central  government  or  a  provincial  leader 
who  might  aspire,  with  the  help  of  his  army,  to  rule  the  entire  country.  The 
competition  from  outside  -  and  thus  the  threat  of  war  by  foreign  powers 
or,  as  in  the  case  of  Taiwan,  against  an  overbearing  competing  polity  -  has 
also  been  a  major  ingredient  in  the  combination  of  changes  and  continuities 
between  the  1650s  and  today. 


Military  service  and  the  Russian  social 
order,  1649-1861 

Elise  Kimerling  Wirtschafter 


From  roughly  the  mid-fifteenth  century,  a  centralized  monarchy  developed 
in  the  Moscow  region  of  the  Russian  lands,  and  the  building  of  the  Russian 
service  state  got  underway.  Critical  to  the  monarchy's  accumulation  of 
powers  was  the  linking  of  noble  status,  including  the  possession  of  land  and 
serfs,  with  service  to  the  prince.  Although  a  core  of  great  noble  families  held 
patrimonial  lands  in  hereditary  tenure,  the  majority  of  nobles  possessed 
landed  estates  on  condition  of  service.  By  the  mid-sixteenth  century,  all 
nobles,  including  holders  of  patrimony,  performed  obligatory  service  and, 
following  the  conquest  of  the  khanates  of  Kazan,  Astrakhan,  and  Siberia, 
Muscovy  joined  the  ranks  of  the  world's  multiethnic,  multiconfessional 
empires. 

The  process  of  political  centralization,  military  consolidation,  and 
imperial  expansion  came  to  a  temporary  halt  due  to  Tsar  Ivan  IV's  reign 
of  terror  (the  notorious  oprichnina  of  1565-1572)  and  the  biological  demise 
of  the  dynasty  in  1598.  A  period  of  civil  war,  social  rebellion,  and  foreign 
occupation  known  as  the  "Time  of  Troubles"  ensued.  Order  returned  after 
1613,  when  the  "election"  of  a  new  tsar,  Mikhail  Romanov  (r.  1613-1645), 
ended  the  troubles  and  inaugurated  a  period  of  institutional  restoration  and 
modern  state-building.  In  the  reign  of  Tsar  Aleksei  Mikhailovich  (r.  1645- 
1676),  the  Law  Code  (Ulozhenie)  of  1649  codified  serfdom,  the  social  ranks 
of  Muscovite  society,  and  the  tsardom's  legal-administrative  apparatus. 
Throughout  Russia's  age  of  serfdom,  until  the  emancipation  of  1861,  the  Law 
Code  provided  the  starting  point  for  much  of  the  legislation  that  defined 
the  relationship  between  social  status  and  military  service. 

Alongside  a  centralized  bureaucracy  and  legally  defined  social  groups, 
seventeenth-century  Muscovy  also  produced  a  European-style  military. 
Reform  began  between  the  1630s  and  1660s  with  the  introduction  of  new- 
model  infantry  and  cavalry  regiments,  large-scale  conscription  levies, 
and  lifelong  service,  all  of  which  constituted  significant  steps  toward  the 
formation  of  a  regular  standing  army.1  The  acquisition  of  Left  Bank  Ukraine 

1  Keep,  Soldiers  of  the  Tsar,  Stevens,  Russia's  Wars  of  Emergence;  Fuller,  Strategy  and  Power 
in  Russia. 


394 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


and  the  city  of  Kiev  in  the  period  1654-1667  revealed  that  Muscovy  had 
indeed  achieved  a  degree  of  military  effectiveness.  Still,  the  process  of 
reform  remained  tentative  and  the  monarchy's  military  capacity  limited. 
The  inability  to  sustain  combat  operations  in  distant  theaters,  illustrated  by 
the  failed  Crimean  campaigns  of  1687  and  1689,  led  to  a  flood  of  innovation 
in  the  reign  of  Tsar  Peter  I  (r.  1682/9-1725).2  Under  Peter  annual  conscription 
levies,  lifelong  year-round  service  for  noble  officers  and  peasant  conscripts, 
unprecedented  levels  of  taxation,  tighter  administrative  controls,  and  the 
massive  importation  of  European  technology  and  cultural  models  set  the 
stage  for  Russia's  rise  to  great-power  status.3  The  consolidation  of  Russian 
power  in  the  Baltic  and  Black  Seas,  the  partitions  of  Poland,  the  defeat  of 
Napoleon,  and  Alexander  I's  (r.  1801-1825)  leadership  in  the  Concert  of  Europe 
are  just  a  few  of  the  military  and  diplomatic  successes  that  over  the  next 
century  and  a  half  exemplified  the  empire's  international  stature. 

Russia's  ongoing  military  strength  has  long  baffled  historians,  given 
that  well  into  the  twentieth  century  society  remained  overwhelmingly 
peasant  and  the  economy  overwhelmingly  agrarian.  A  critical  reason  for 
the  effectiveness  of  Russian  power  has  been  the  ability  of  successive  govern- 
ments, and  forms  of  government,  to  mobilize  human  and  material  resources 
over  the  long  duration.  As  early  as  1630/1,  decades  before  the  reforms  of 
Tsar  Peter  I,  regular  levies  of  recruits  and  lifelong  terms  of  service  began. 
During  the  Thirteen  Years'  War  (1654-1667)  with  Poland,  military  drafts 
swept  up  about  100,000  men  and,  although  this  was  no  small  number,  it 
paled  in  comparison  to  what  would  come  in  the  early  eighteenth  century.4 
Historians  estimate  that  inductees  into  the  Petrine  army  numbered  205,000 
in  1700-1711  alone  and  at  least  140,000  in  1713-1724.  At  the  time  of  Peter's  death 
in  1725,  the  Russian  army  consisted  of  130,000  regular  troops;  75,000-80,000 
garrison  troops;  and  20,000  Cossack  irregulars.5  In  the  post-Petrine  era, 
the  military  continued  to  grow,  along  with  the  empire's  population  and 
territorial  expanse.  By  the  mid-eighteenth  century,  the  army  numbered 
292,000  troops  in  a  population  of  23,230,000;  and  in  1800, 446,000  troops  in 
a  population  of  37,414,000.  Between  1705  and  1801,  roughly  2.25  million  men 

2  Between  1682  and  1689,  Peter  I  and  co-tsar  Ivan  V  ruled  under  the  regency  of  Sophia,  Peter's 
half-sister  and  Ivan's  full  sister.  In  1689  Peter  and  his  supporters  broke  with  Sophia,  who  was 
confined  to  a  convent.  Peter's  effective  reign  began  in  1694,  when  his  mother  died,  but  he  did 
not  formally  become  sole  ruler  until  the  death  of  Ivan  in  1696. 

3  Cracraft,  The  Revolution  of  Peter  the  Great. 

4  Moon,  The  Russian  Peasantry,  pp.  82-83;  Keep,  Soldiers  of  the  Tsar,  pp.  50-62,  80-92;  Fuller, 
Strategy  and  Power  in  Russia,  p.  7. 

5  Fuller,  Strategy  and  Power  in  Russia,  pp.  45-46. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


395 


were  drafted;  in  the  years  1796  to  1815, 1,616,199;  and  in  the  period  1816  to 
i855, 3,158,199.  Just  a  few  years  prior  to  the  outbreak  of  the  Crimean  War,  a 
time  of  relative  peace  for  the  empire,  the  size  of  the  army  reached  859, ooo.6 

The  actual  "burden  of  defense"  imposed  on  Russian  society  is  difficult 
to  calculate,  and  the  figures  that  are  available  should  be  viewed  only  as 
rough  estimates.7  Russian  data  from  the  period  are  generally  inadequate 
for  sophisticated  statistical  analysis.  Nor  is  it  always  clear  which  troops 
historians  are  counting.  In  addition  to  the  empire's  regular  standing 
army,  the  military  establishment  included  garrison  troops,  veterans' 
units,  military  colonies,  Cossacks,  and  various  irregular  hosts  manned 
by  ethnic  minorities.  The  point  here  is  not  to  measure  the  burden  carried 
by  the  Russian  people  -  surely  it  was  substantial  -  but  to  highlight  the 
organizational  effort  needed  to  conscript,  train,  and  maintain  such  a  large 
military  force.  However  inefficient  and  arbitrary  this  effort  sometimes 
appears,  it  was  effective  in  sustaining  costly  military  victories  and  ongoing 
imperial  expansion. 

Decades  before  the  appearance  of  revolutionary  France's  citizen  army, 
Russia  developed  a  system  of  mass  conscription  based  on  the  institution  of 
serfdom,  the  social  arrangements  set  forth  in  the  Law  Code  of  1649,  and  the 
reforms  of  Tsar  Peter  I.  Both  the  Muscovite  Law  Code  and  Petrine  legislation 
bound  individuals  to  local  communities  and  social  categories  that  were 
defined  by  their  privileges  and  obligations  to  the  state.  Beginning  in  1719- 
1728,  periodic  censuses  identified  male  taxpayers  liable  for  conscription  and 
payment  of  the  capitation.  The  combination  of  census  registration,  conscrip- 
tion levies,  and  collection  of  the  capitation  facilitated  resource  mobilization 
and  greatly  increased  state  revenues.  The  groups  counted  in  the  censuses 
included  all  categories  of  peasants  and  townspeople  who  lacked  the  capital 
to  qualify  for  merchant  status.  Sons  of  clergy  and  ecclesiastical  ranks  who 
did  not  have  church  appointments  also  could  be  conscripted  by  special  levy, 
even  though  they  were  not  inscribed  in  the  census  rolls  and  did  not  pay  the 
capitation.  Nobles  likewise  remained  exempt  from  census  registration  and 
payment  of  the  capitation,  but  they  continued  to  serve  in  the  military  or 
in  civil  administration  until  the  emancipation  of  1762  made  their  service 
voluntary.  With  the  exception  of  elite  merchants,  who  paid  an  annual  fee 
in  return  for  specific  socioeconomic  privileges,  all  of  these  statuses,  taxed 
and  untaxed,  were  inherited  from  the  father  at  birth.  Changes  of  status 

6  Hartley,  Russia,  7762-7S25,  pp.  10-11;  Wirtschafter,  From  Serf  to  Russian  Soldier,  p.  3;  Curtiss, 
The  Russian  Army  under  Nicholas  I,  p.  108. 

7  Pintner,  "The  Burden  of  Defense  in  Imperial  Russia". 


396 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCH AFTER 


could  occur  through  service,  marriage  (for  women  only),  or  monarchical 
decree;  however,  such  changes  rarely  affected  peasants,  who  by  most  counts 
comprised  80  to  90  per  cent  of  the  overall  population.  Whether  peasants 
were  attached  to  seigneurial,  state,  ecclesiastical/economic,  or  crown  lands, 
they  remained  bound  to  their  village  of  origin,  paid  the  capitation,  and  at 
age  seventeen  became  liable  for  military  service.8 

Military  service  and  the  peasant  commune 

Russian  military  achievements  from  the  reign  of  Tsar  Peter  I  to  the  Crimean 
War  of  1853-1856  cannot  be  understood  apart  from  the  history  of  serfdom, 
an  institution,  or  social  mechanism,  that  made  possible  the  effective 
mobilization  of  human  and  material  resources  across  a  vast  and  sparsely 
populated  territory.  The  imposition  of  legal  restrictions  on  peasant  move- 
ment had  begun  already  in  the  late  fifteenth  century,  when  the  Muscovite 
monarchy  consolidated  its  authority  in  the  central  region  of  the  Russian 
lands.  For  the  next  two  centuries,  the  development  of  serfdom  paralleled  the 
development  of  noble  classes  that  served  the  Moscow  grand  prince.  A  basic 
calculus  emerged,  according  to  which  Russian  peasants  provided  for  the 
Muscovite  elite  so  that  the  elite  could  in  turn  serve  the  tsar.  From  the  outset, 
then,  serfdom  functioned  as  the  means  to  support  military  servicemen  and 
mobilize  resources  for  the  prince.  These  statist  goals,  more  than  the  estate 
culture  of  noble  landlords,  determined  the  role  that  serfdom  would  play  in 
Russian  society  and  polity.9 

The  basic  unit  of  peasant  society  was  the  commune,  governed  by  a  village 
assembly  composed  of  the  heads  of  member  households.  The  origins  of  the 
commune  remain  obscure,  but  the  institution  most  likely  evolved  out  of  the 
agricultural  practices  of  the  East  Slavic  tribes  who,  prior  to  the  emergence 
of  the  Kievan  polity  in  the  ninth  century,  occupied  what  would  become 
the  Russian  lands.  When  Muscovite  state-building  began  in  the  fifteenth 
century,  the  commune  was  already  managing  village  relationships  and 
access  to  resources.  From  that  point  onward,  successive  Russian  govern- 
ments linked  monarchical  and  seigneurial  authority  to  the  commune  in 
order  to  extract  resources  and  exploit  peasant  labor.  Controlled  by  village 
patriarchs  and  elected  peasant  officials,  the  commune  exercised  economic, 


8  The  Recruitment  Statute  of  1766  set  the  age  of  conscription  at  seventeen  to  thirty-five. 

9  Hellie,  Enserfment  and  Military  Change  in  Muscovy. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


397 


social,  and  judicial  authority  and  acted  as  the  intermediary  between  the 
peasant  community  and  the  landlord  or  government. 

From  the  peasant  perspective,  the  commune's  most  important  functions 
were  to  regulate  production  in  open  fields  and  to  guarantee  that  each 
household  enjoyed  access  to  common  resources  such  as  water,  forest,  and 
pasture.  Although  environmental  conditions  and  agricultural  arrangements 
varied  across  the  empire,  the  communal  structures  that  developed  in  the 
central  and  steppe  regions  of  European  Russia  provided  the  foundation  for 
Russian  social  and  political  arrangements.10  One  of  the  key  mechanisms 
that  developed  out  of  communal  structures,  particularly  communal  land 
tenure,  was  the  periodic  repartition  or  redistribution  of  arable  fields  based 
on  the  number  of  husband/wife  work  teams  in  a  household.  The  goal  of  this 
mechanism  was  to  ensure  that  each  household  possessed  sufficient  land  to 
support  its  members  and  meet  its  obligations  to  the  community,  landlord, 
and  state.  During  both  the  Muscovite  and  the  imperial  periods,  it  was  the 
commune  that  enforced  the  fulfillment  of  labor,  monetary,  and  service 
obligations.  Based  on  the  principle  of  collective  responsibility  (krugovaia 
poruka),  the  entire  peasant  community  assumed  liability  for  the  obligations 
of  individual  members.  Whether  the  task  at  hand  concerned  the  delivery 
of  recruits,  the  performance  of  labor,  or  the  payment  of  taxes  and  feudal 
dues,  the  commune  guaranteed  that  government  and  seigneurial  demands 
were  met.  If  a  household  could  not  meet  its  obligations,  fellow  villagers 
took  up  the  slack. 

In  addition  to  extracting  resources,  communal  authorities,  in  cooperation 
with  noble  landowners,  also  policed  the  countryside.  Communal  authorities 
disciplined  noncompliant  peasants,  and  the  village  community  provided 
assistance  in  times  of  illness,  death,  or  natural  disaster.  When  social  order 
broke  down,  peasant  officials  punished  troublemakers  or  cooperated 
with  the  landlord  to  do  so.  In  cases  of  collective  disobedience  or  outright 
rebellion,  the  arrival  of  troops  usually  sufficed  to  restore  calm.  The  peas- 
ant commune  most  certainly  did  not  embody  the  natural  communism 
imagined  by  nineteenth-century  Russian  socialists,  but  it  was  a  vibrant 
and  deeply  embedded  institution  that  for  centuries  met  the  economic  and 
social  needs  of  Russian  peasants.  Ultimately,  the  commune  proved  more 
resilient  than  either  the  monarchy  or  the  nobility.  Weathering  the  storms  of 
political  centralization,  foreign  invasion,  capitalist  industrialization,  social 
revolution,  and  wartime  crisis,  the  commune  adapted  to  changes  in  Russian 
society  and  economy.  Through  World  War  I,  the  February  and  Bolshevik 


10    Moon,  The  Russian  Peasantry. 


398 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCH AFTER 


Revolutions,  and  the  civil  war  of  1918-1921,  the  commune  continued  to 
structure  peasant  life,  disappearing  only  when  the  Soviet  regime  used 
violence  and  brutal  repression  to  impose  collectivization  during  the  First 
Five-Year  Plan. 

In  imperial  Russia,  the  process  of  conscription,  which  started  at  the 
village  level,  highlighted  key  problems  of  social  development  resulting  from 
the  intersection  of  military  service  and  the  peasant  commune.  Although 
state-imposed  social  arrangements  defined  conscription,  particularly 
liability  for  service,  realities  on  the  ground  also  affected  the  official  arrange- 
ments. Whether  the  demands  of  the  state  or  the  organization  of  peasant  life 
determined  the  parameters  of  conscription  is  not  always  clear.  Orders  to 
conduct  conscription  levies  came  from  St.  Petersburg,  and  officials  selected 
recruits  based  on  units  of  100  to  500  men.  Usually,  one  man  per  unit  would 
be  taken,  though  in  times  of  intensive  warfare,  the  burden  increased.11  Once 
recruitment  orders  reached  the  countryside,  local  officials,  landlords,  and 
peasant  communities  assumed  responsibility  for  delivering  the  specified 
number  of  individuals.  At  this  point,  the  communal  organization  of  peas- 
ant life  played  the  critical  role.  Because  there  was  very  little  legislation 
pertaining  to  conscription  before  the  early  nineteenth  century  -  only  in  1831 
did  a  full  codification  of  the  rules  for  conducting  levies  appear  -  peasant 
practices  determined  the  recruitment  process.  It  is  possible,  therefore,  that 
these  practices  provided  the  basis  for  the  specific  mechanisms  subsequently 
prescribed  by  state  law. 

Like  the  distribution  of  land  allotments,  feudal  dues,  labor  obligations, 
and  capitation  payments,  the  burden  of  conscription  depended  on  the 
number  of  able-bodied  males  in  a  peasant  household.  Each  recruitment  unit 
of  100  to  500  men  consisted  of  peasant  families,  usually  extended  families, 
organized  in  a  rotational  order  defined  by  the  number  and  ages  of  adult 
male  laborers.  Peasants,  landlords,  and  the  state  all  sought  to  distribute  the 
burden  of  service  in  an  equitable  manner  that  would  preserve  the  ability 
of  each  household  to  sustain  its  members  and  meet  its  fiscal  and  labor 
obligations.  In  other  words,  the  loss  of  a  male  laborer  to  the  army  was  not 
supposed  to  undermine  the  economic  viability  of  the  household.  For  this 
reason,  large  households  stood  first  in  line  to  provide  recruits,  while  families 
with  only  one  laborer  remained  exempt.  The  recruitment  regulation  of  1831 
extended  this  exemption  to  include  families  containing  a  father  and  only 
one  son.  The  regulation  also  specified  that  bachelors  be  chosen  before  mar- 

11  In  1812,  the  year  Napoleon  invaded  Russia  and  occupied  Moscow,  there  were  three  levies  of 
20  recruits  per  500  men:  Hartley,  Russia,  7762-7825,  p.  26. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


399 


ried  men  and  childless  husbands  before  those  with  children.  Both  legislative 
prescriptions  and  the  egalitarian  principles  of  communityjustice  aimed  to 
minimize  the  social  and  economic  disruptions  caused  by  military  service. 

Despite  efforts  to  distribute  the  burden  of  service  in  an  even-handed 
manner,  peasants  viewed  conscription  as  a  tragedy.  From  the  peasant 
perspective,  the  reality  of  conscription  defied  the  egalitarian  beauty  of  the 
"line  system".  Hence  the  proverb  "One  son  is  not  a  son.  Two  sons  are  half  a 
son.  Three  sons  are  a  son."12  Indeed,  the  legal  niceties  of  official  regulations 
were  not  always  observed  in  real  life.  Peasant  practices  varied  significantly 
and,  although  many  landlords  and  communes  insisted  that  large  households 
be  first  in  line  to  provide  recruits,  others  preferred  to  rid  the  community 
of  economically  weak  peasants  who  were  landless  or  had  fallen  behind  in 
paying  dues  and  taxes.  Communities  and  landlords  also  used  conscription 
for  disciplinary  purposes,  sending  off  criminals,  troublemakers,  drunkards, 
and  men  deemed  disobedient,  unruly,  or  simply  lazy.  Nor  was  there  much 
protection  from  the  administrative  arbitrariness  of  corrupt  officials  or 
abusive  landlords.  Bribery  always  remained  a  possibility  in  the  workings 
of  tsarist  administration,  and  wealthier  peasants  possessed  the  means  to 
purchase  substitutes  or  exemption  receipts.  Physical  requirements  likewise 
could  undercut  the  equity  of  the  line  system.  In  1850,  for  example,  only 
66,544  out  of  139,002  recruits  delivered  to  the  military  were  accepted  into 
service.  The  rest  were  rejected  because  of  height,  age,  physical  disabilities, 
or  chronic  diseases.13  Physical  inadequacies  and  the  appearance  of  chronic 
disease  might  be  staged  or  self-inflicted  but,  regardless  of  the  reasons  for 
rejection,  unfit  recruits  had  to  be  replaced  by  their  respective  communities. 

Soldiers  in  society 

The  institution  of  serfdom  and  the  relationship  of  individuals  to  local  com- 
munities created  circumstances  that  gave  to  Russian  conscription  and 
the  entire  military  system  distinctive  characteristics.  As  noted  above,  the 
Law  Code  of  1649  bound  all  Russian  subjects,  except  for  nobles  and  clergy, 
to  their  place  of  residence.  Peter  I's  government  built  upon  this  bondage 
in  defining  socioeconomic  privileges  and  service  obligations  to  the  state. 
Once  a  peasant  (of  any  category)  or  a  townsman  was  drafted,  however  - 
more  precisely,  once  he  took  the  oath  of  allegiance  to  the  tsar  -  he  became 

12  Wirtschafter,  From  Serf  to  Russian  Soldier,  p.  3. 

13  Ibid.,  p.  24. 


400 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


legally  free  from  the  capitation,  the  mark  of  lower-class  status,  and  from 
any  obligations  to  the  local  community  Given  the  long  term  of  service  -  life 
until  1793,  twenty-five  years  after  that,  and  twenty  years  with  five  years  in 
the  reserve  beginning  in  1834  -  this  legal  freedom,  which  in  and  of  itself 
constituted  upward  social  mobility,  could  not  be  realized  in  everyday  life. 
Only  if  a  soldier  survived  the  long  term  of  service  or  became  unsuitable  for 
military  duties  did  he  have  a  chance  to  actuate  his  legal  freedom  by  moving 
into  a  higher  social  rank  or  profession. 

The  ambiguity  of  the  soldier's  social  advancement  was  equally  striking  in 
the  case  of  his  wife.  Because  a  woman's  social  status  depended  on  her  father 
and,  after  marriage,  on  her  husband,  soldiers'  wives  also  became  legally  free 
at  the  moment  of  a  husband's  induction  into  military  service.  Once  again, 
however,  the  upward  mobility  represented  by  legal  emancipation  contrasted 
sharply  with  harsh  social  reality.  No  longer  a  legally  bound  member  of  the 
village  community,  soldiers'  wives  became  dependent  on  the  generosity 
of  relatives,  communes,  and  landlords.  Many  villages  provided  land  and 
assistance  to  support  soldiers'  wives  and  their  children,  especially  male 
children  who  would  grow  up  to  become  able-bodied  members  of  the  peasant 
community.  But  given  that  soldiers  served  for  life  or  for  twenty-five  years, 
and  given  that  a  woman  could  not  remarry  without  proof  of  her  spouse's 
death,  soldiers'  wives  also  produced  illegitimate  children  and  gained  a 
reputation  for  loose  morals.  Needless  to  say,  illegitimate  children  and  unat- 
tached women  were  not  always  welcome  in  patriarchal  village  communities. 

Soldiers'  wives  did  have  options,  however.  Most  remained  in  the  village, 
but  if  they  chose  or  were  forced  to  leave  home,  their  legal  freedom  created  a 
number  of  possibilities.14  Soldiers'  wives,  when  practicable,  could  live  among 
the  troops,  or  with  the  permission  of  their  husbands,  obtain  passports  that 
allowed  them  to  settle  in  towns.  Military  commanders  employed  them  in 
"female  occupations"  such  as  making  tents;  sewing,  washing,  and  mend- 
ing clothes;  and  working  in  hospitals.  Because  soldiers'  wives  enjoyed  the 
privileges  of  free  social  categories,  they  also  could  engage  in  urban  trades, 
that  is,  in  occupations  and  commercial  endeavors  preserved  for  the  legal 
residents  of  towns.  Women  who  became  town-dwellers  remained  outside 
the  formal  urban  community  and  therefore  enjoyed  exemption  from  the 
capitation  and  various  labor  obligations.  There  is  limited  information 
about  the  occupations  pursued  by  soldiers'  wives,  but  they  are  known 
to  have  been  active  participants  in  prostitution  and  in  the  trafficking 
of  unwanted  children  between  the  countryside  and  the  Moscow  and  St. 

14    Shcherbinin,  Voennyifactor v  povsednevnoi  zhizni  russkoi  zhenshchiny. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


401 


Petersburg  foundling  homes.  By  the  mid-nineteenth  century,  some  also 
found  employment  in  the  factories  that  had  begun  to  dot  the  landscape  of 
central  Russia.  Although  the  loss  of  membership  in  an  officially  recognized 
community  gave  soldiers'  wives  legal  tools  for  social  advancement,  it  also 
deprived  them  of  secure  socioeconomic  moorings.  Both  literary  and  official 
sources  give  the  impression  that  soldiers'  wives  struggled  to  find  a  place  in 
society.  Most  continued  to  live  as  peasants,  and  some  managed  to  achieve 
independence  by  establishing  themselves  in  urban  occupations,  but  others 
suffered  endless  exploitation  and  abuse. 

The  vulnerability  of  soldiers'  wives  also  affected  their  children,  both 
legitimate  and  illegitimate.  Family  life  could  be  complicated  in  the  Russian 
army,  especially  outside  the  garrison  towns.  In  general,  the  presence  of 
retired  soldiers  and  soldiers'  families  created  legal  ambiguities  and  welfare 
problems  that  the  government  could  not  ignore.  One  response  was  to  es- 
tablish yet  another  legally  defined  social  category,  the  "soldiers'  children" 
(soldatskie  deti).15  This  category  existed  from  1719  to  1856  and  included  any 
children  born  to  soldiers  after  their  induction  into  active  military  service. 
The  illegitimate  children  of  soldiers'  wives,  girlfriends,  and  daughters  also 
belonged  to  the  "soldiers'  children".  All  of  these  children,  regardless  of  origin, 
came  under  the  authority  of  the  military  domain  (voennoe  vedomstvo),  and 
the  males  among  them  were  destined  for  a  life  of  military  service.  Soldiers' 
sons  could  live  with  parents  or  relatives  until  age  eighteen,  when  they  began 
active  service,  or  they  could  enter  special  military  schools  at  age  seven. 
In  1797, 12,000  soldiers'  sons  were  enrolled  in  military  schools  and,  by  the 
time  the  category  was  abolished  in  1856,  the  number  had  reached  378,000. 
Most  became  common  soldiers  or  noncommissioned  officers,  though  some 
learned  crafts,  worked  as  copyists,  or  acquired  technical  and  administrative 
skills  needed  by  the  military. 

Unlike  conscripted  peasants  and  townsmen  who  began  military  service 
in  the  lowest  unskilled  ranks,  soldiers'  children  possessed  a  modicum  of 
education  that  created  opportunities  for  meaningful  social  mobility.  They 
were  especially  important  as  a  source  of  noncommissioned  officers.  In 
the  years  1836-1856,  the  schools  for  soldiers'  sons,  which  also  could  include 
students  from  other  social  categories,  produced  15,634  noncommissioned 
officers  and  6,771  musicians  for  the  army.  Data  from  1863  show  that  among 
officers  promoted  from  nonnoble  social  groups,  56  per  cent  or  365  of  654 
came  from  the  soldiers'  children.16  Despite  the  chance  of  real  upward  mobil- 

15  [Wirtschafter],  "Soldiers'  Children,  1719-1856". 

16  Wirtschafter,  From  Serf  to  Russian  Soldier,  pp.  38-39, 16611. 


402 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


ity,  the  parents  of  soldiers'  children  did  everything  possible  to  conceal  their 
offspring  from  military  officials.  Just  as  the  fact  of  legal  emancipation  did 
not  make  military  service  desirable  among  peasants,  so  too  the  opportunity 
to  receive  an  education  and  rise  in  the  social  hierarchy  did  not  undermine 
the  natural  desire  of  soldiers'  wives  to  keep  their  sons  at  home.  Landlords 
too  proved  eager  to  claim  soldiers'  children  as  peasants  in  order  to  augment 
the  population  of  their  estates.  No  wonder  the  Decembrist  leader  P.I.  Pestel 
described  the  status  of  soldiers'  children  as  bondage  or  slavery  (kabal)  to 
the  state.  Many  parents  obviously  agreed.  Separated  from  home  and  hearth 
at  a  young  age,  forced  to  endure  harsh  discipline  and  material  privation  in 
underfunded  and  poorly  administered  military  schools,  soldiers'  sons  still 
faced  twenty-five  years  of  active  service  beginning  at  age  eighteen. 

The  story  of  the  serf  Makei  Aleksandrov,  who  sought  recognition  as  an 
illegally  enserfed  soldier's  son,  highlights  the  challenges  faced  by  military 
families.17  Brought  before  the  Bronnitsy  district  court  in  Moscow  province 
in  1843,  Aleksandrov  was  accused  of  striking  a  peasant  official  (starosta) 
and  failing  to  extinguish  a  fire.  Aleksandrov  denied  the  identity  ascribed 
to  him  and  instead  claimed  to  be  Makei  Filipov,  the  illegitimate  son  of  a 
soldier's  wife,  a  status  that  carried  legal  freedom.  After  several  peasants 
testified  to  Aleksandrov's  disorderly  and  negligent  conduct,  the  court 
sentenced  him  to  fifty  blows  with  birches  and  returned  him  to  his  master. 
Aleksandrov  denounced  the  judgement,  and  his  case  was  forwarded  to 
the  Moscow  criminal  chamber,  which  approved  the  lower  court's  deci- 
sion. Undeterred,  in  September  1844,  Aleksandrov  petitioned  the  Moscow 
military  governor-general,  who  immediately  took  steps  to  corroborate  the 
serf's  self-proclaimed  free  status.  Perhaps  because  the  tsarist  army  always 
needed  soldiers,  the  provincial-level  authorities  treated  Aleksandrov's 
assertions  seriously.  They  instructed  their  subordinates  to  investigate  his 
origins  and  ordered  his  master,  Provincial  Secretary  Isakov,  to  present 
appropriate  documentation. 

In  Aleksandrov's  appeal  to  the  governor-general,  he  claimed  that  his 
birth  to  the  soldier's  wife  Nastas'ia  Nikiforova  could  be  verified  in  the  parish 
registers  of  a  village  in  Bronnitsy  district.  To  support  this  story,  Aleksandrov 
identified  his  godparents,  an  older  sister  (also  illegitimate)  who  lived  on 
another  estate,  and  several  additional  relatives,  including  a  son  from  a 
forced  marriage.  Aleksandrov  admitted  to  being  registered  to  the  nobleman 
Isakov  in  the  eighth  census,  and  during  the  judicial  proceedings  he  con- 

17  Tsentral'nyi  gosudarstvennyi  istoricheskii  arkhiv  goroda  Moskvy,  f.  16  (Kantseliariia 
Moskovskogo  general-gubernatora),  op.  13,  d.  449. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


403 


tinued  to  make  quitrent  payments.  But,  the  serf  proclaimed,  he  remained 
a  wrongfully  condemned  free  man,  prosecuted  for  his  alleged  crimes  only 
after  he  initiated  a  lawsuit  seeking  emancipation.  Aleksandrov's  boldness 
notwithstanding,  he  did  not  expect  to  receive  fair  treatment  at  the  hands 
of  local  officials.  His  master,  Aleksandrov  declared,  was  himself  an  official 
and  friendly  with  members  of  the  district  court.  In  light  of  such  unjust 
circumstances,  Aleksandrov  requested  the  transfer  of  his  case  to  another 
locality  and  written  permission  to  live  independently  until  authorities 
reached  a  final  decision.  These  requests  were  denied;  however,  district 
officials,  under  direct  pressure  from  superiors,  continued  to  seek  additional 
information  from  Aleksandrov's  registered  owner. 

At  this  point  the  archival  record  falls  silent,  and  the  final  resolution  of 
the  case  is  not  known.  Perhaps  the  governor-general's  interest  produced 
documentation  that  corroborated  the  convicted  serf's  story.  If  Makei 
Aleksandrov  was  in  fact  the  illegitimate  son  of  a  soldier's  wife  then,  earlier 
in  his  life,  his  mother  or  landlord,  or  perhaps  he  himself,  had  successfully 
hidden  his  identity  from  the  military  authorities.  Maybe  by  1843  he  was  old 
enough  to  think  that  he  could  avoid  front-line  duty  if  he  entered  military 
service.  Regardless  of  how  the  case  ended,  and  it  is  possible  that  no  deci- 
sion was  reached,  the  tribulations  or  machinations  of  Makei  Aleksandrov, 
self-defined  as  Filipov,  demonstrate  how  the  legal  freedom  of  soldiers  and 
their  families  could  become  both  a  source  of  vulnerability  and  a  tool  for 
survival  among  the  empire's  lowliest  subjects.  The  telling  point  is  that  a 
serf  understood  the  legal  freedom  associated  with  the  status  of  soldier's 
son,  or  a  soldier's  son  understood  the  illegality  of  his  enserfment.  In  either 
situation,  belief  in  the  benefits  of  legal  freedom,  including  the  chance  to 
escape  the  conditions  of  serfdom,  led  an  individual  to  act. 

The  special  condition  of  soldiers'  children  resulted  from  the  legal  and 
socioeconomic  realities  of  serfdom  and  from  Russia's  broader  social  ar- 
rangements based  on  inherited  status.  The  intersection  of  serfdom  and 
military  service  created  a  class  of  free  individuals  situated  outside  the 
peasantry  and  other  widely  recognized  social  categories.  Soldiers'  children 
were  not  the  only  group  that  occupied  ambiguous  terrain  in  Russian  society. 
Retired  soldiers  and  soldiers'  wives  were  similarly  placed,  as  were  a  variety 
of  service,  proto-professional,  economic,  and  educated  ranks.  Built  around 
the  institution  of  serfdom,  the  Russian  social  order  produced  numerous 
small  categories  defined,  like  the  larger  "estates"  (sosloviia  or  sostoianiia), 
by  specific  privileges,  obligations,  and  functions.  These  categories,  referred 
to  collectively  as  the  "people  of  various  ranks",  illustrate  the  uncertainties 


404 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


of  social  status  that  were  broadly  characteristic  of  imperial  Russia.18  In  ad- 
dition, their  development  shows  how  individuals,  communities,  and  groups 
in  society  were  able  to  use  official  categories  and  legislative  prescriptions, 
precisely  because  of  the  ambiguities  they  produced,  for  their  own  purposes 
-  in  order  to  survive,  prosper,  resist  authority,  and  negotiate  position  within 
the  framework  of  the  social  order. 

Soldiers  in  service 

After  a  peasant  or  townsman  entered  military  service,  received  appoint- 
ment to  a  regiment,  and  underwent  basic  training,  he  became  a  soldier  in 
the  service  of  the  tsar,  but  a  soldier  whose  everyday  life  remained  closely 
connected  to  civilian  society.  The  modern  standing  army  created  by  Tsar  Pe- 
ter I  and  repeatedly  reformed  by  his  successors  -  the  army  that  established 
Russian  power  in  the  Baltic  and  Black  Seas,  secured  Russia's  western  and 
southwestern  frontiers  against  Sweden  and  the  Ottoman  Empire,  eliminated 
the  threat  posed  by  the  Crimean  Tatars,  established  a  Russian  foothold  in 
Transcaucasia  at  the  expense  of  Persia,  and  utterly  destroyed  Napoleon's 
Grande  Armee  -  this  army  was  far  from  regular  and  only  partially  standing. 
Even  if  one  disregards  distinctly  irregular  troops  such  as  the  Cossacks,  who 
played  such  an  important  role  in  Russian  military  history,  and  looks  solely  at 
the  regular  line  forces,  the  Russian  army  is  best  described  as  semi-standing. 
Housed  primarily  in  peasant  huts  and  urban  homes,  Russian  troops  lived 
in  a  variety  of  conditions  and  remained  economically  dependent  on  local, 
often  civilian,  resources.  In  the  spring  and  summer,  military  units  came 
together  in  camps  to  train  and  perform  state  works  (for  example,  building 
and  maintaining  roads,  bridges,  and  fortresses),  but  for  six  to  eight  months 
out  of  the  year,  in  peacetime  of  course,  soldiers  lived  dispersed  in  private 
homes.  As  late  as  i860,  only  28  per  cent  of  the  tsar's  troops  could  be  housed 
in  barracks  and  other  state  buildings.19  State  works  and  dispersed  quarters 
limited  the  attention  given  to  military  training  and  kept  soldiers  in  a  civilian 
environment  for  extended  periods  of  time. 

The  interconnectedness  of  military  and  civilian  society  reached  deeply 
into  the  workings  of  the  regimental  economy  and  hence  also  into  the  eve- 
ryday life  of  common  soldiers.  The  army's  peacetime  system  of  supply  dated 

18  Wirtschafter,  Structures  of  Society,  Idem,  "Legal  Identity  and  the  Possession  of  Serfs  in 
Imperial  Russia". 

19  Wirtschafter,  From  Serf  to  Russian  Soldier,  p.  81. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


405 


from  the  reign  of  Tsar  Peter  I,  when  the  central  government  began  to  assume 
responsibility  for  clothing,  housing,  provisioning,  and  equipping  the  troops. 
That  said,  in  the  underinstitutionalized  administrative  environment  of  the 
Russian  Empire,  the  desire  to  centralize  resource  allocation  could  only  go 
so  far.  The  limits  to  bureaucratic  regulation,  even  in  conditions  of  absolutist 
monarchy,  were  readily  apparent.  Unit  commanders  retained  immediate 
responsibility  for  the  wellbeing  of  their  subordinates  and  were  often  forced 
to  acquire  supplies  locally.  As  late  as  the  mid-nineteenth  century,  state 
resources  remained  inadequate,  and  the  troops  repeatedly  faced  shortages 
of  food,  clothing,  and  equipment.  The  solution  to  this  dilemma  was  local 
procurement  and  economic  self-sufficiency  within  military  units.  Although 
the  government  tried  to  regulate  the  norms  of  pay,  provisioning,  and  supply 
for  the  individual  soldier  and  his  regiment,  official  standards  were  difficult 
to  enforce,  especially  when  the  troops  were  dispersed  in  peasant  huts  and 
economically  dependent  on  civilian  hosts.  The  need  to  concentrate  troops 
in  border  regions  and  garrisons  also  meant  that  the  burden  of  supplying  the 
troops  could  not  be  evenly  or  fairly  distributed  among  the  civilian  popula- 
tion. Conflicts  between  soldiers  and  local  residents  inevitably  erupted 
although,  on  average,  the  Russian  people  accepted  the  obligation  to  provide 
for  the  troops. 

The  economic  improvisation  required  of  the  Russian  army  produced 
material  uncertainty,  administrative  arbitrariness,  social  volatility,  and 
effective  solutions.  To  understand  how  the  army  functioned,  it  is  important 
to  look  at  how  individual  units  coped  with  the  concrete  conditions  they 
faced.  In  September  1822,  for  example,  soldiers  from  the  Second  Battalion 
of  the  Thirty-Second  Jager  Regiment  complained  of  not  receiving  money 
for  cartage  in  1818  or  for  meat  and  liquor  during  eight  months  of  guard  duty. 
In  addition,  the  men  of  the  Second  Carabineer  Company  claimed  that  in 
1818-1819  they  had  earned  560  rubles,  presumably  at  outside  work,  but  did 
not  know  the  whereabouts  of  the  money  or  how  it  had  been  spent.  They  also 
complained  that  800  rubles  belonging  to  their  artel',  a  collective  soldiers' 
fund,  had  been  sent  to  the  treasury  without  their  permission.  Whereas  the 
soldiers'  complaints  revealed  detailed  knowledge  of  their  economic  rights 
and  resources,  as  well  as  suspicions  about  the  good  intentions  of  their  com- 
manders, the  response  of  the  battalion  commander  highlighted  deficiencies 
in  the  supply  system  that  repeatedly  produced  these  and  similar  disorders. 

An  investigation  ordered  by  the  commander-in-chief  of  the  Second  Army 
showed  that  in  1818  a  regimental  order  had  reallocated  funds  assigned  for 
transport  to  the  repair  of  equipment.  The  soldiers  had  in  fact  received  money 
for  meat  and  liquor  to  cover  two  months  of  the  May  trimester.  But  because 


406 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCH AFTER 


the  regiment  had  not  received  any  funds  for  the  September  trimester,  com- 
manders had  withheld  allocations  for  the  remaining  two  months  of  the 
previous  trimester.  The  units  in  question  also  had  not  received  provisions  for 
January  because  the  Kiliia  magazine,  located  in  Bessarabia,  was  empty.  As 
a  result,  it  had  been  necessary  to  insist  that  hostile  local  residents  feed  the 
men.  Finally,  the  corps  commander  had  ordered  the  battalion  commander 
to  put  800  rubles  that  belonged  to  the  soldiers'  artel'  in  a  loan  bank  to  earn 
interest.  In  the  end,  the  commander-in-chief  accepted  the  explanations  of 
the  battalion  and  company  commanders,  requiring  only  that  they  pay  the 
expenses  of  the  three  officials  sent  to  investigate  the  soldiers'  complaints.20 

As  conditions  in  the  Second  Army  illustrate,  commanders  repeatedly 
provided  for  their  subordinates  by  rearranging  allocations  and  demanding 
that  civilians  supply  food.  Another  response  to  inadequate  state  supplies 
and  monies  was  to  purchase  goods  from  private  contractors  using  regi- 
mental funds.  Soldiers  also  sometimes  produced  items  such  as  uniforms 
and  footwear  for  themselves,  assuming  they  had  the  necessary  materials 
on  hand.  In  any  of  these  circumstances,  unofficial  outside  work  might  be 
a  critical  source  of  supplementary  income  used  to  fill  the  gaps  in  state 
supplies.  Archival  documents  from  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century 
describe  four  types  of  outside  work.  First,  soldiers  worked  directly  for  su- 
periors and  theoretically  received  payment  for  their  labor.  Second,  parties 
of  five  to  ten  men  worked  under  contracts  concluded  between  company 
commanders  and  outside  parties.  Third,  soldiers  with  special  skills  -  for 
example,  artisans  and  tailors  -  used  their  free  time  to  produce  goods  for  sale; 
and  fourth,  among  stationary  regiments  located  in  fortresses  and  garrison 
towns,  it  was  sometimes  possible  to  establish  economic  enterprises  such 
as  gardens  and  shops  that  provided  supplies  and  profits  for  military  units. 

Private  enterprise  among  the  troops  could  be  mutually  beneficial  for 
commanders  and  soldiers,  though  such  activities  did  little  to  promote 
military  efficiency  or  effectiveness.21  Conditions  in  the  Kinburn  Artillery 
Garrison  in  the  reign  of  Nicholas  I  (r.  1825-1855)  illustrate  the  point.  Ac- 
cording to  a  report  from  August  1850,  submitted  by  the  commandant  of 
the  Kinburn  Fortress,  the  commander  of  Artillery  Half-Company  No.  1, 
Lieutenant  Colonel  Loman,  managed  a  farm  where  he  kept  up  to  twenty 
head  of  cattle,  pigs,  and  geese.  The  farm  was  not  in  itself  regarded  as  illegal, 
though  the  extent  of  Loman's  enterprise  raised  concerns.  The  stench  and 
filth  produced  by  the  farm  were  considered  harmful  to  the  health  of  the 

20  Ibid.,  p.  94. 

21  Ibid.,  pp.  89-90. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


407 


troops.  The  commandant's  report  led  to  an  investigation,  and  in  December 
1851  three  bombardiers  testified  that  soldiers  willingly  worked  for  Loman, 
who  paid  them  75  paper  kopecks  a  day.  Of  this,  25  kopecks  went  into  the 
soldiers'  provisioning  artel'  and  the  rest  belonged  to  the  individual  men. 
The  result  was  a  mutually  satisfying  relationship  between  Loman  and  his 
subordinates. 

Other  officers  in  the  Kinburn  Garrison  told  a  different  story.  Critical  of 
Loman,  they  complained  that  he  freed  soldiers  from  service  obligations  and 
training  if  they  worked  for  him  without  pay.  When,  moreover,  the  officers 
ordered  the  soldiers  to  work,  they  responded  with  disrespect,  coarseness, 
and  outright  disobedience.  The  military  judicial  authorities  agreed  that 
Loman's  attitude  toward  unofficial  work  had  begun  to  interfere  with  the 
fulfillment  of  service  duties,  but  the  archival  record  does  not  indicate  that 
he  was  punished  or  that  his  farm  was  shut  down.  Military  performance 
aside,  Loman's  activities  may  have  been  motivated  by  the  need  to  provide  for 
his  men.  As  long  as  state  supplies  remained  inadequate,  officials  could  not 
effectively  combat  economic  corruption  and  abuse.  In  many  circumstances 
corruption  was  born  of  necessity. 

Just  a  few  years  before  the  Kinburn  investigation,  on  9  March  1846,  the 
commander  of  the  Southern  Artillery  Region  had  informed  all  garrison 
commanders  that,  if  state  monies  were  not  sufficient  to  produce  munitions 
for  their  soldiers,  they  should  release  three  privates  from  each  half-company 
to  engage  in  outside  work.  The  men  sent  to  labor  would  receive  a  quarter 
of  their  earnings,  and  the  rest  would  go  to  the  economic  resources  used  to 
purchase  material  for  uniforms  and  other  equipment  that  the  state  was 
supposed  to  fund.  Citing  the  Military  Code  of  1838  (book  1,  part  3,  article 
438),  the  regional  commander  justified  the  order  by  noting  that  the  Com- 
missariat continued  to  issue  munitions  monies  for  the  artillery  based  on  a 
table  of  1809.  Given  that  the  allocated  sums  were  no  longer  adequate,  the 
garrisons  had  no  choice  but  to  release  soldiers  for  outside  work.  Military 
training  was  important,  but  physical  survival  came  first.  Despite  the  legal 
separateness  of  Russia's  military  ranks,  soldiers  remained  dependent  on 
the  civilian  economy,  and  many  of  their  routine  activities  would  have  been 
familiar  to  any  peasant. 

The  flexibility  of  Russia's  socioeconomic  and  legal-administrative  struc- 
tures surely  helped  the  army  to  function;  however,  the  vulnerabilities  of  the 
military  economy  also  could  be  socially  explosive.  This  is  illustrated  by  an 
1857  court-martial  of  twenty-one  soldiers  from  the  Aland  fortifications,  who 


408 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


were  accused  of  disobedience  against  their  commander.22  On  28  September 
1856,  Ensign  Shchetinin  had  informed  his  men  that  provisions  were  low  and 
that  supplies  would  be  obtained  from  Abo.  The  men,  agreeing  to  provide 
for  themselves  with  state  funds  until  provisions  arrived,  received  money 
for  food  through  8  October.  In  addition,  for  the  period  7-14  October,  the 
soldiers  reportedly  were  able  to  buy  beef,  which  was  supposed  to  last  until 

21  October.  Although  the  defendants  claimed  that  half  the  meat  was  spoiled, 
they  also  had  received  funds  for  meal  and  potatoes. 

On  14  October,  when  the  expected  supplies  did  not  arrive,  the  situation  at 
Aland  began  to  deteriorate.  The  soldiers  again  received  money  on  the  14th, 
but  when  they  requested  additional  funds  on  the  15th,  Shchetinin  told  them 
they  would  have  to  wait.  On  the  15th  and  16th  the  men  carried  on  with  their 
duties,  but  then  on  the  17th  a  noncommissioned  officer  informed  Shchetinin 
that  the  men  of  Company  No.  4  were  demanding  money.  Shchetinin  had 
run  out  of  state  funds,  so  he  distributed  his  own  money  for  the  15th  and 
16th.  He  also  questioned  the  men  of  Company  No.  4,  who  complained  that 
they  had  nothing  to  eat  and  already  owed  local  residents  money  for  the 
past  two  days.  Shchetinin  doubted  their  story,  believing  that  the  soldiers 
did  have  adequate  provisions.  He  also  insisted  that  local  residents  could 
wait  until  supplies  arrived  to  be  reimbursed.  Ensign  Shchetinin  therefore 
ordered  his  men  back  to  work. 

At  this  point,  soldiers  from  other  companies  also  started  to  complain. 
A  few  men  from  Companies  No.  5,  6,  and  7  obeyed  the  order  to  work,  but 
eighteen  men  from  Company  No.  4  refused  and  returned  to  their  quarters. 
Shchetinin  responded  by  giving  them  more  of  his  own  money  for  17  October. 
Meanwhile,  soldiers  from  other  companies  refused  to  work.  Why  are  we 
going  to  work,  they  asked,  when  Company  No.  4  refuses  to  go?  "Hardly  so 
that  they  [alone]  will  be  guilty."  In  the  end,  on  17  October,  only  Company 
No.  7  and  some  men  from  Company  No.  6  complied  with  orders.  Supplies 
arrived  soon  after  this  incident,  and  Shchetinin  took  steps  to  restore  his 
authority.  A  complete  breakdown  of  discipline  had  been  averted.  But  then 
on  18  October,  when  Shchetinin  tried  to  punish  three  "instigators",  the 
men  of  Company  No.  4  refused  to  allow  the  punishments.  "They  did  not 
steal  anything",  the  soldiers  proclaimed.  Nor,  as  one  gunner  put  it,  did  the 
tsar  "order  us  to  starve".  With  that  the  entire  company  walked  off,  and 
Shchetinin  initiated  a  judicial  process. 

22  Rossiiskii  gosudarts  venny  i  voenno-istoricheskii  arkhiv,  f.  801  (Auditoriatskii  departament 
voennogo  ministerstva),  op.  73,  d.  32.  The  case  is  discussed  in  Wirtschafter,  From  Serf  to  Russian 
Soldier,  pp.  145-147. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


409 


In  the  eyes  of  the  military  authorities,  the  events  at  Aland  represented 
a  clear  case  of  insubordination.  Military  judicial  officials  condemned  the 
men  of  Company  No.  4  on  two  grounds.  First,  the  testimony  of  some  soldiers 
indicated  that  the  men  had  sufficient  supplies  of  food.  Still,  the  archival 
record  does  not  indicate  that  Shchetinin  actually  inspected  Company  No.  4, 
which  was  quartered  at  some  distance,  so  it  is  possible  that  this  unit  did 
not  have  enough  to  eat.  One  also  has  to  wonder  why  Shchetinin  continued 
to  give  out  his  own  money,  if  he  was  convinced  the  men  had  adequate 
provisions.  The  second  point  raised  by  officials  of  the  Military  Judicial 
Department  was  that  the  men  of  Company  No.  4  could  obtain  food  on  credit 
from  local  inhabitants.  In  general,  commanders  assumed  that  when  state 
supplies  were  unavailable,  military  units  would  acquire  provisions  from 
local  residents.  Moreover,  even  when  this  proved  impossible,  the  lack  of 
food  and  funds  did  not  justify  disobedience.  Clearly,  the  situation  at  Aland 
resulted  from  circumstances  beyond  Shchetinin's  control. 

The  soldiers'  testimony  tells  a  different  story.  In  their  eyes,  the  "crime" 
of  Company  No.  4  consisted  of  demanding  money  allotted  to  them  by  law. 
They  knew  their  commander  was  responsible  for  feeding  them  and  thus 
refused  to  work  when  they  did  not  receive  their  daily  allowance.  They  also 
refused  to  allow  their  comrades  to  be  punished:  the  soldiers  had  a  right 
to  the  money,  which  meant  that  no  one  was  guilty  and  no  punishment 
justified.  Repeatedly,  in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  Russian 
soldiers  committed  acts  of  disobedience  when  their  rights  were  violated 
-  when  their  commanders  abused  them,  neglected  to  provide  for  them,  or 
punished  them  unjustly.  Although  in  the  eyes  of  the  government  disobedi- 
ence could  never  be  justified,  if  a  commander's  negligence  or  abuse  caused 
the  disobedience,  he  would  be  punished  along  with  his  subordinates.  In 
this  case,  Ensign  Shchetinin  faced  two  weeks  of  arrest  for  "inefficiency"  in 
provisioning  his  unit.  Eighteen  men  from  Company  No.  4  were  found  guilty 
of  "overt  disobedience"  and  sentenced  to  run  the  gauntlet  two  to  four  times 
through  100  men,  followed  by  three  to  five  years  of  service  in  a  convicts' 
company.  Four  of  the  men  were  judged  medically  unfit  to  undergo  corporal 
punishment  and  so  avoided  that  part  of  their  sentence.  Other  men  from 
Companies  No.  5  and  6  faced  milder  punishments,  and  two  noncommis- 
sioned officers  were  demoted  and  transferred  for  failing  to  ensure  that  their 
subordinates  returned  to  work.  As  this  and  many  other  court  cases  show, 
the  system  of  military  justice  afforded  soldiers  a  measure  of  protection. 
In  theory  and  practice,  military  justice  sanctioned  expectations  of  decent 
treatment  and  economic  security. 


410 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


The  unrest  at  the  Aland  Fortress  highlights  the  extent  to  which  local 
circumstances  determined  the  army's  ability  to  maintain  the  troops.  Al- 
though the  details  of  concrete  cases  differ,  local  commanders  repeatedly 
had  to  improvise  in  order  to  provide  for  their  men.  Soldiers  cooperated  in 
this  effort,  as  did  civilians  who  made  "donations"  to  nearby  military  units. 
In  addition  to  seeking  donations  -  the  alternative  to  which  might  have  been 
food  riots  by  armed  soldiers  -  commanders  put  their  men  out  to  work  in 
the  local  economy.  Improvisation  and  nonmilitary  work  represented  key 
tools  in  the  arsenal  of  physical  survival.  Of  course,  local  self-sufficiency  also 
produced  significant  variations  and  chronic  irregularities.  Outright  corrup- 
tion likewise  played  a  role,  and  it  is  no  surprise  that  economic  crimes  were 
among  the  most  common  for  which  officers  faced  courts-martial.  Some 
officers  exploited  the  labor  of  their  men  in  the  manner  of  noble  serf-owners; 
others  abused  or  seriously  neglected  their  subordinates.  Even  when  soldiers 
and  their  commanders  cooperated  to  achieve  economic  security,  or  if,  from 
the  state's  perspective,  they  colluded  to  rob  the  treasury,  the  vagaries  of 
the  supply  system  produced  endless  conflicts,  both  between  officers  and 
soldiers  and  between  the  military  and  civilian  populations.  These  conflicts 
created  disorders,  but  they  did  not  undermine  the  overall  effectiveness  of 
Russia's  military  system.  To  understand  this  effectiveness,  it  is  important  to 
consider  how  the  monarchy  sustained  its  legitimacy,  how  the  government 
wielded  social  control,  and  why  soldiers  and  their  commanders  remained 
loyal  servicemen. 

Political  culture  and  social  integration 

Given  the  interdependence  of  military  and  civilian  life,  it  is  no  surprise 
that  the  Russian  monarchy  governed  the  army  in  the  same  way  it  gov- 
erned society  at  large  -  through  direct  personalized  relationships  between 
subordinates  and  figures  of  authority.  These  relationships  reached  from 
the  village,  town,  or  military  unit  to  community  and  local  authorities; 
to  landlords,  provincial  governors,  and  military  commanders;  then  on  to 
high-level  officials  and  officers,  and  most  importantly  to  the  monarch. 
"For  Faith,  Tsar,  and  Fatherland"  may  have  been  an  official  mantra,  but  it 
accurately  represented  important  features  of  Russia's  enduring  political 
culture.  Throughout  Russia's  age  of  serfdom  the  cement  of  society  remained 
widespread  acceptance  of  social  hierarchy,  absolutist  monarchy,  and  church 
authority.  The  threat  of  repression  invariably  hung  in  the  air,  but  without 
reference  to  the  belief  in  church,  monarch,  and  country,  it  is  impossible  to 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


411 


explain  how  until  the  1860s,  the  Russian  Empire  -  an  empire  built  upon 
human  bondage  -  sustained  great-power  status  in  Europe  and  Asia.  Only  by 
addressing  questions  of  motivation  and  morale  is  it  possible  to  understand 
how  the  Russian  government  consistently  mobilized  material  and  human 
resources  for  military  service. 

Across  the  Russian  Empire,  ordinary  people  expressed  themselves,  and 
now  speak  to  historians,  through  judicial  proceedings.  Although  judicial 
speech  acts  do  not  take  scholars  into  the  recesses  of  social  consciousness, 
they  do  shed  light  on  how  individuals  negotiated  the  social  order  and 
became  integrated  into  society  and  polity.  To  determine  whether  judicial 
testimony  represented  genuine  conviction  or  clever  dissimulation  designed 
to  achieve  a  specific  goal  is  frequently  impossible.  In  the  military  judicial 
records  of  the  early  nineteenth  century  there  are  numerous  instances  of 
what  could  have  been  dissimulation.  As  the  cases  already  discussed  il- 
lustrate, disobedient  soldiers,  deserters,  and  reluctant  recruits  knew  what 
they  needed  to  say  in  order  to  gain  a  sympathetic  hearing  from  officials. 
For  this  reason,  despite  concerns  about  reliability  or  truthfulness,  judicial 
records  reveal  much  about  political  culture  and  the  functioning  of  author- 
ity relationships.  Time  and  again,  injudicial  testimony,  Russian  subjects 
described  their  life  experiences  and  circumstances  in  terms  that  they 
assumed  to  be  not  only  permissible  but  also  capable  of  eliciting  sympathy 
and  a  favorable  outcome.  Clearly,  formal  justice  offered  people  a  measure 
of  protection  against  abuse  and  exploitation.  Equally  important,  it  allowed 
individuals  and  communities  to  manipulate  legal  prescriptions  for  personal 
and  collective  gain.23 

In  the  Russian  army  of  the  early  nineteenth  century,  soldiers  correctly 
assumed,  and  sincerely  believed,  that  they  were  entitled  to  food,  clothing, 
and  fairness.  They  also  knew  that  cruelty  and  negligence  on  the  part  of 
military  commanders  represented  punishable  offenses.  For  this  reason, 
they  used  accusations  of  abuse  to  justify  disobedience  and  desertion. 
Even  if  neglect  or  cruel  treatment  did  not  excuse  such  behavior,  it  might 
gain  soldiers  a  sympathetic  hearing  before  higher  authorities.  There  was, 
however,  a  problem  with  the  soldiers'  understanding  of  cruelty.  Unlike  the 
economic  crimes  of  commanders,  which  could  be  identified  with  relative 
ease,  the  meaning  of  cruelty  remained  amorphous  and  changeable.  Official 
and  popular  notions  of  what  constituted  cruelty  did  not  always  coincide. 


23  Wirtschafter,  Structures  of  Society,  Idem,  "Legal  Identity  and  the  Possession  of  Serfs  in 
Imperial  Russia". 


412 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


The  ambiguity  surrounding  accusations  of  cruelty  can  be  seen  from  an 
investigation  of  1818,  during  which  soldiers  from  the  Astrakhan  Grenadier 
Regiment  complained  of  abusive  treatment  at  the  hands  of  their  former 
commander,  Major  Kridner.24  The  investigating  officer,  General  Adjutant 
Baron  I.I.  Dibich,  commander  of  Main  Headquarters  of  the  First  Army,  found 
that  some  of  the  soldiers'  claims  were  indeed  justified.  Kridner  had  subjected 
decorated  soldiers  to  corporal  punishments,  which,  while  not  excessive,  did 
violate  legal  prohibitions.  In  addition,  some  men  also  testified  that  they 
had  received  500  blows  with  sticks  and  100  to  150  blows  with  broadswords. 
These  punishments  may  have  been  illegal,  although,  according  to  Dibich, 
the  soldiers'  claims  were  exaggerated:  every  time  he  questioned  the  men, 
they  reported  a  higher  number  of  blows.  Most  of  the  soldiers'  complaints 
concerned  punishments  of  twenty-five  to  fifty  blows  with  sticks  for  neglect 
of  duty.  These  punishments  rarely  occurred  more  than  once  a  month,  and, 
while  they  were  frequent  and  severe,  in  Dibich's  judgment,  they  did  not 
exceed  legal  norms.  To  the  contrary,  the  men  of  the  Astrakhan  regiment 
were  lazy  and  insubordinate,  and  because  the  regiment's  performance 
lagged  in  comparison  to  other  units,  strict  measures  were  in  order.  Baron 
Dibich  therefore  cleared  Major  Kridner  of  any  wrongdoing. 

In  other  judicial  cases  officers  were  found  guilty  of  cruel  treatment  and 
punished  accordingly,  but  the  definition  of  cruelty  remained  imprecise 
and  dependent  on  circumstances.  What  might  be  regarded  as  cruelty  in 
one  situation  became  justified  severity  in  another.  The  losers  in  this  ar- 
rangement were  of  course  the  soldiers,  who  were  left  to  develop  their  own 
understanding  of  what  constituted  cruel  or  unjustified  punishment.  That 
soldiers  frequently  did  not  have  their  way  injudicial  proceedings  is  no 
surprise.  Russia  remained  a  monarchical  polity,  hierarchical  society,  and 
aggressive  empire.  Although  many  high-level  officials  and  commanders 
did  try  to  uphold  the  law,  the  preservation  of  order  always  took  precedence 
over  legal  rights.  Still,  despite  definite,  though  not  necessarily  clear,  limits 
to  the  redress  available  to  regular  people,  there  was  just  enough  justice 
in  the  Russian  system  of  government  to  perpetuate  the  myth  of  the  tsar. 
Soldiers,  like  peasants,  continued  to  believe  that  individual  landowners, 
state  officials,  and  military  commanders  were  responsible  for  corruption 
and  abuse,  and  that,  if  only  the  ruler  could  be  informed  of  the  abuses,  he  or 
she  would  intervene  to  address  grievances  and  make  just  amends. 

Absolutist  monarchy  persisted  in  Russia  long  after  the  empire  became 
integrated  into  the  European  state  system,  and  long  after  the  court,  nobility, 

24  Wirtschafter,  From  Serf  to  Russian  Soldier,  pp.  132-136. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


413 


and  educated  classes  became  culturally  Europeanized.  One  explanation  for 
the  strength  of  the  monarchy  is  that,  contrary  to  present-day  misconcep- 
tions, absolutism  in  Russia  (and  elsewhere  in  Europe)  never  meant  absolute 
control  of  state,  society,  or  economy,  and  certainly  not  of  local  communities 
or  individual  lives.  It  did  mean,  however,  that  the  monarch  represented 
the  highest  judicial  and  legislative  authority  and  that  at  any  moment  he 
or  she  could  overturn  the  decisions  of  administrative  offices  and  courts. 
Divinely  anointed  and  answerable  to  God  alone,  the  monarch  was  bound 
to  obey  the  law,  though  he  or  she  also  could  change  the  law  at  will.  Equally 
significant,  Russia  did  not  possess  time-honored  institutions  or  legally 
constituted  corporate  bodies  that  mediated  the  monarch's  relationship  to 
individuals,  communities,  and  groups  in  society.  The  peasant  commune 
can  be  counted  as  a  collective  "institution",  but  the  commune  embodied  a 
set  of  peasant  practices  that  were  not  legally  or  contractually  constituted. 
The  self-sufficiency  of  the  commune,  and  likewise  of  military  units,  high- 
lighted the  fact  that,  despite  the  tsar's  absolutist  political  power,  the  empire 
remained  undergoverned  and  underinstitutionalized.  The  remoteness  of 
effective  state  power,  and  the  de  facto  freedom  it  allowed,  kept  authority 
relationships  personalized  and  abuses  individualized.  In  these  conditions, 
the  tsarist  myth  could  be  perpetuated,  and  people  could  manipulate  laws 
and  institutions  to  meet  their  own  needs. 

The  monarchy's  relationship  to  Russia's  service  classes,  including  the 
nobility,  represented  another  critical  element  in  the  calculus  of  political 
legitimacy.  Beginning  in  the  late  fifteenth  century,  a  "place  system"  or  rank 
ordering  of  noble  families  (called  mestnichestvo)  regulated  relations  within 
the  Russian  elite  and  between  that  elite  and  the  tsar.  The  place  system 
determined  precedence  in  service  appointments  and  at  court,  ensuring  that 
no  individual  received  an  appointment  or  occupied  a  position  above  another 
whose  family  held  a  higher  place  in  the  genealogical  hierarchy.  Mestnich- 
estvo disputes  undermined  the  corporate  power  of  Muscovy's  upper  nobility 
and  kept  many  a  family  and  official  busy  with  time-consuming  litigation. 
But  mestnichestvo  also  encouraged  social  cohesion  based  on  shared  notions 
of  family  honor  and  represented  a  formal  limit  on  the  power  of  the  tsar. 
This  formal  limit  did  not,  however,  produce  contractual  or  constitutional 
arrangements.  During  the  seventeenth  century,  mestnichestvo  eroded  and, 
even  before  its  abolition  in  1682,  the  ruler  acquired  sufficient  power  to  ap- 
point favorites  and  men  of  undistinguished  lineage  to  high  office,  especially 
in  the  military.  The  process  of  modern  state-building  meant  that  not  only 
favorites,  but  also  Russia's  noble  ranks  as  a  whole,  benefited  from  the  service 
and  educational  opportunities  created  by  a  growing  bureaucracy  and  army. 


414 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


Even  with  the  rise  of  new  nobles,  there  was  sufficient  room  in  the  service 
class  and  sufficient  demand  in  the  service  hierarchy  for  established  families 
to  preserve  their  power  and  privileges.  The  result  was  a  lack  of  opposition 
to  abolishing  the  traditional  order  of  families  protected  by  mestnichestvo 
and  a  strengthening  of  the  individual  serviceman's  dependence  on  the  tsar. 

In  the  early  eighteenth  century  a  new  set  of  institutions  began  to  regulate 
the  noble  service  classes  and  their  relationship  to  the  monarchy.  The  new 
arrangements  came  to  fruition  in  the  Petrine  reforms,  which  agglomer- 
ated the  noble  ranks  of  Muscovy  into  an  hereditary  nobility.  This  meant 
in  principle  that  all  nobles  (lineal  and  service)  enjoyed  the  same  rights, 
privileges,  and  obligations,  though  in  practice  economic  stratification  and 
family  ties  continued  to  determine  access  to  education  and  the  rewards  of 
service.  The  Russian  nobility's  character  as  an  open  "class"  also  endured, 
becoming  codified  in  the  Table  of  Ranks,  which  from  1722  regulated  and 
bureaucratized  the  relationship  between  lineage,  service,  and  noble  status. 
The  Table  of  Ranks  consisted  of  fourteen  classes  or  grades,  each  of  which  cor- 
responded to  specific  titles  and  offices  in  the  service  hierarchy.  In  military 
service,  the  attainment  of  rank  fourteen,  the  lowest  commissioned  officer 
rank,  granted  noble  status,  and  in  civil  service,  the  attainment  of  rank  eight 
brought  ennoblement.  Well-connected  nobles,  and  increasingly  men  of 
education,  continued  to  enjoy  advantages  in  receiving  service  appointments 
and  promotions,  but,  along  with  lineage  and  the  tsar's  favor,  a  measure  of 
merit  had  been  written  into  the  legal  mechanism  of  social  advancement. 

The  Table  of  Ranks  did  not  transform  the  Petrine  service  state  into  a 
meritocracy,  but  it  did  regularize  and  institutionalize  promotions  based 
on  education,  talent,  and  zeal.  As  in  the  seventeenth  century,  the  ongoing 
expansion  of  the  military  and  bureaucratic  establishments,  combined  with 
the  demand  for  educated  servicemen  and  technical  specialists,  increased 
the  opportunities  for  men  of  humble  birth  to  rise.  Over  the  long  duration, 
social  origin  became  less  important  in  defining  service  careers,  though 
elite  birth  and  high  position  still  tended  to  go  hand  in  hand.  Even  when 
opportunity  truly  depended  on  education,  nobles,  and  to  a  lesser  degree  the 
sons  of  nonnoble  officials,  possessed  greater  access  to  education  and  thus 
could  more  readily  be  identified  as  men  of  talent.  The  goal  of  Peter  and  his 
successors  was  not  to  dislodge  Russian  grandees  from  positions  of  social  and 
political  dominance,  but  rather  to  ensure  that  nobles  acquired  the  education 
and  skills  needed  to  compete  in  the  modern  European  world.  For  nobles,  as 
for  peasants  and  townspeople,  the  burden  of  service  increased  significantly 
in  the  Petrine  era.  Russian  nobles  accepted  this  burden,  just  as  they  accepted 
the  abolition  of  mestnichestvo,  with  surprisingly  little  resistance.  As  the 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


415 


power  of  the  state  increased,  so  too  did  their  own  power,  privileges,  and 
status,  not  just  in  Russia,  but  also  on  the  larger  European  stage.25 

From  the  late  seventeenth  century,  it  can  be  said,  the  Russian  nobility, 
a  service  nobility  from  the  outset,  bought  into  the  Russian  state  project. 
Equally  important,  throughout  the  eighteenth  century,  Russian  elites 
continued  to  lack  a  political  language  or  set  of  shared  ideas  that  would 
have  allowed  them  to  conceptualize  political  arrangements  outside  the 
serviceman's  personal  relationship  to  the  monarch  or  to  superiors  and 
patrons.  At  no  time  during  Russia's  age  of  serfdom  did  the  authority  of  noble 
landowners  extend  beyond  the  boundaries  of  their  patrimonial  estates. 
Russian  nobles  held  no  offices  or  military  commands,  and  they  sat  in  no 
corporate  bodies  -  noble  assemblies  were  created  by  monarchical  decree 
in  the  reign  of  Catherine  II  (r.  1762-1796)  -  simply  because  they  were  born 
noble  or  possessed  landed  estates.  All  offices  and  commands  in  the  imperial 
system  represented  appointments  by  the  monarch  or  royal  representatives. 
To  be  sure,  patronage,  clientage,  and  family  connections  played  a  role  in  the 
political  economy,  but  these  factors  could  always  be  overridden  by  the  will 
of  the  tsar.  Although  the  1785  Charter  to  the  Nobility  guaranteed  that  the 
deprivation  of  noble  status  would  not  occur  outside  court  proceedings,  when 
it  came  to  state  offices  and  military  commands,  the  ruler  could  disgrace  or 
elevate  any  individual  at  any  time,  regardless  of  his  or  her  family  position. 
Russia's  nobles,  including  military  officers  and  higher-ranked  civil  serv- 
ants, comprised  a  service  class,  not  an  autonomous  corporation.  Whatever 
"corporate"  rights  or  privileges  they  acquired  were  granted  by  the  monarch 
and  could  be  taken  away  by  imperial  decree. 

Of  course,  this  did  not  happen  in  practice,  except  arguably  in  1861  when 
Alexander  II  (r.  1855-1881)  deprived  nobles  of  their  human  property  by 
emancipating  the  serfs.  In  most  circumstances,  the  ruler's  disfavor  affected 
individuals  or  small  groups  of  conspirators,  and  not  until  the  Decembrist 
Rebellion  of  1825  did  the  monarchy  face  any  overt  political  opposition. 
In  eighteenth-  and  early  nineteenth-century  Russia,  social  and  political 
ideals  stayed  within  the  bounds  of  the  moderate  mainstream  Enlighten- 
ment, which  sought  to  reconcile  equality,  rationality,  and  freedom  with 
established  political  and  religious  authority.  The  democratic  principles  of 
the  radical  Enlightenment  did  not  begin  to  affect  Russian  thought,  much 
less  actual  social  and  political  arrangements,  before  the  1820s.  Dissident 
voices  did  arise  in  the  eighteenth  century,  but  few  called  for  radical  social 
or  political  change.  Instead,  enlightened  thinkers  focused  on  the  moral 


25  Wirtschafter,  Russia's  Age  of  Serfdom,  pp.  19, 27. 


41 6 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


self-reformation  and  perfectibility  of  the  individual  human  being,  and 
because  of  the  emphasis  on  the  individualized  pursuit  of  enlightenment, 
as  opposed  to  the  institutional  realization  of  democratic  principles,  the 
Russian  version  of  European  Enlightenment  appeared  fully  compatible 
with  absolutist  monarchy  and  the  teachings  of  Orthodox  Christianity26 

Throughout  Russia's  age  of  serfdom,  the  strength  of  the  monarchy 
remained  closely  intertwined  with  the  strength  of  the  Orthodox  religious 
tradition.  The  Russian  Orthodox  Church  preached  a  concept  of  Christian 
rulership  that  based  both  authority  and  obedience  on  morality  and  love.  By 
the  late  eighteenth  century,  state-builders,  preachers,  and  poets  had  concep- 
tualized the  personalized  authority  relations  between  the  Russian  monarch 
and  his  or  her  individual  subjects  into  an  explicitly  moral  relationship  in 
which  virtuous  rulers  deserved  to  be  obeyed.  Although  the  monarchy's 
first  concern  was  state  power  and  the  church's  the  salvation  of  souls,  the 
means  to  these  ends  overlapped.  Subjects  who  lived  an  enlightened  life, 
a  life  of  civic  and  Christian  virtue,  both  served  the  monarch  and  obeyed 
God's  commandments.  Historians  who  find  it  difficult  to  explain  how  in  the 
face  of  inequity,  injustice,  and  abuse,  Russian  subjects,  including  educated 
and  enlightened  individuals,  accepted  social  and  political  arrangements 
based  on  serfdom  should  listen  carefully  to  the  empire's  religious  teach- 
ers. Until  the  1820s,  church,  monarchy,  and  educated  service  classes  alike 
understood  the  social  order  to  be  natural  or  God-given,  and  few  imagined 
that  traditional  relationships  built  upon  patriarchy  and  hierarchy  might  be 
incompatible  with  modern  progress.  As  monarchists  who  believed  in  the 
power  of  Christian  love,  they  combined  Enlightenment  universalism  with 
belief  in  the  unity  of  God's  creation.  The  result  was  a  holistic  conception  of 
the  relationship  between  society,  polity,  and  church.  All  were  of  a  piece,  all 
had  a  role  to  play,  and  all  belonged  to  the  harmonious  universal  order  that 
underlay  Enlightenment  aspirations  and  the  modern  idea  of  progress  -  the 
idea  that  the  condition  of  humanity  could  and  should  be  ameliorated. 

Russian  intellectuals  could  be  highly  critical  of  their  society,  yet  before 
the  1820s  this  criticism  tended  to  produce  reconciliation  rather  than  re- 
volt. Echoing  legislative  projects  and  church  teachings,  literary  works  and 
personal  correspondence  revealed  a  desire  to  live  within  existing  institu- 
tions, despite  awareness  of  their  costs.  Because  Russia's  laboring  people 
and  common  soldiers  rarely  expressed  themselves  in  writing  and  almost 
never  revealed  their  thoughts  or  feelings  about  the  social  relationships  that 
defined  their  lives,  historians  cannot  know  if  they  subscribed  to  the  ideas 

26  Israel,  Revolution  of  the  Mind;  Wirtschafter,  Russia's  Age  of  Serfdom,  pp.  144-165. 


MILITARY  SERVICE  AND  THE  RUSSIAN  SOCIAL  ORDER,  1649-1861 


417 


and  ideals  expressed  in  religious,  legislative,  and  literary  sources.  Prior  to 
the  abolition  of  serfdom  in  1861,  peasants  and  townspeople  appeared  to 
accept  conscription,  taxation,  and  a  host  of  labor  obligations,  and  soldiers 
appeared  to  go  obediently  into  battle.  The  pages  of  Russian  history  maybe 
filled  with  repressive  coercion,  but  there  is  considerable  evidence  that  the 
integration  of  society  and  polity,  and  hence  also  the  obedience  of  Russian 
soldiers,  hinged  on  more  than  fear  of  punishment. 

Until  the  beginning  of  the  twentieth  century,  large  numbers  of  Russian 
subjects  either  accepted  absolutist  monarchy  or  remained  convinced  that  it 
could  not  be  altered.  On  average,  belief  in  the  tsar's  goodness  and  desire  for 
justice  held  firm.  When  an  individual  ruler  behaved  tyrannically  or  violated 
rightful  order,  he  or  she  could  presumably  be  removed  -  not  because  anyone 
questioned  the  legitimacy  of  monarchy,  but  because  the  person  occupying 
the  throne  had  turned  out  to  be  a  false  tsar.  That  peasant  conscripts  obedi- 
ently entered  service,  that  peasant  soldiers  bravely  marched  into  battle, 
that  noble  and  educated  elites  did  not  rebel  against  the  monarchy  until  the 
second  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century  -  these  circumstances  suggest 
that  long  after  secularism,  materialism,  deism,  and  atheism  had  become 
firmly  established  in  western  and  central  Europe,  most  Russians  continued 
to  believe  in  God,  tsar,  and  church. 

Conclusion 

The  outstanding  feature  of  imperial  Russia's  serf  army  was  its  economic, 
social,  and  cultural  flexibility  -  a  flexibility  that  emanated  directly  from 
the  mechanisms  connecting  the  Russian  service  state  to  the  structures  of 
society.  With  a  social  order  based  on  unfree  labor  and  a  political  system 
rooted  in  absolutist  monarchy,  the  Russian  Empire  competed  effectively 
in  military  and  diplomatic  arenas  that  stretched  across  Europe  and  Asia. 
Sharing  borders  with  Europe,  the  Ottoman  Empire,  Persia,  and  China,  the 
empire  encompassed  multiethnic,  multiconfessional  territories  inhabited 
by  nomadic,  peasant,  and  "modern"  European  peoples.  Precisely  because 
the  Russian  army  depended  for  its  survival  on  local  resources  and  com- 
munities, it  proved  capable  of  responding  to  diverse  needs  and  challenges. 
The  adaptability  of  Russia's  social  and  political  institutions,  including 
military  institutions,  is  often  overlooked  in  discussions  of  the  autocratic 
monarchy  and  centralized  state  apparatus.  Political  arrangements  may  have 
been  absolutist  and  sacred,  but  social  arrangements  were  amorphous  and 


41 8 


ELISE  KIMERLING  WIRTSCHAFTER 


changeable.  It  can  therefore  be  difficult  to  describe  the  Russian  military 
system  with  reference  to  a  specific  typology  of  variables. 

As  a  system  of  labor,  the  Russian  army  combined  serfdom  with  mass 
conscription,  and  until  1762  even  hereditary  nobles,  the  bulk  of  the  officer 
class,  were  bound  to  serve.  Within  the  regimental  economy,  monetary  pay- 
ments played  a  role,  but  remained  inadequate,  and  so  the  need  to  improvise 
produced  free,  unfree,  commodified,  and  noncommodified  forms  of  work. 
The  long  term  of  service  and  the  change  in  legal  status  that  accompanied 
conscription  turned  common  soldiers  and  nonnoble  specialists  into  a 
distinct  class  of  military  ranks  and  families  whose  labor  could  be  exploited 
but  whose  social  welfare  needs  also  had  to  be  addressed.  During  the  pe- 
riod under  study,  despite  technological  progress  and  population  growth, 
fundamental  socioeconomic  and  institutional  change  did  not  occur.  Only 
after  the  general  emancipation  of  the  serfs  in  the  Great  Reforms  of  the 
1860s  could  universal  liability  for  conscription,  a  shorter  term  of  service, 
and  effective  combat  reserves  be  established.  Already  in  Muscovite  times, 
and  with  greater  precision  and  comprehensiveness  from  the  reign  of  Peter 
I  until  the  emancipation  of  1861,  the  Russian  monarchy  governed  a  service 
state  in  which  every  social  group  performed  specific  functions.  Nobles, 
clergy,  and  merchants,  not  to  mention  peasants,  lesser  townspeople,  and 
nonnoble  servicemen,  occupied  legally  defined  social  statuses  that  at  once 
granted  privileges  and  imposed  obligations.  Even  among  the  most  elite 
social  groups,  the  acquisition  and  preservation  of  privileges  depended  on 
service.  When  privileges  became  hereditary  and  independent  of  service, 
as  occurred  with  the  nobility  in  1762,  they  still  represented  a  grant  from 
the  monarch,  defined  in  state  law  -  a  grant  that  he  or  she  could  rescind  at 
any  time.  If  military  service  in  the  age  of  serfdom  constituted  a  system  of 
labor,  so  too  did  every  other  social  status  and  occupation. 


The  French  army,  1789-1914 

Volunteers,  pressed  soldiers,  and  conscripts 
Thomas  Hippler 

According  to  a  common  belief,  modern  military  conscription  was  invented 
during  the  French  Revolution.  Subsequently  it  became  a  cornerstone  of 
republicanism  in  the  French  understanding.  Without  any  doubt,  there  is 
some  truth  in  this  view;  however,  there  is  also  much  confusion  about  the 
terms  of  the  debate.  If  we  have  a  closer  look  at  actual  recruitment  practices 
in  France  in  the  late  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries  and  if  we  compare 
these  to  practices  in  other  historical  periods  or  geographical  contexts  the 
distinctions  quickly  become  less  clear.  The  first  question  to  be  addressed 
is  thus  how  to  distinguish  in  a  historically  convincing  way  different  forms 
of  military  labour,  which  are  enslavement,  professionals,  mercenaries, 
and  conscription.  It  will  actually  turn  out  that  these  distinctions  have 
necessarily  to  be  linked  to  systems  of  social  representation,  and  they  are 
inseparable  from  social  norms  and  values,  as  well  as  from  representations 
of  social  justice  and  of  legitimate  social  orders.  Things  get  worse  if  we  keep 
in  mind  that  historical  scholarship  in  itself  is  always  and  necessarily  linked 
to  and  indeed  involved  in  the  construction  of  these  normative  and  symbolic 
orders  themselves.  To  stick  to  the  French  case:  there  has  been  a  constant 
tendency  to  link  the  setting-up  of  the  cadre/conscript  system  during  the 
last  third  of  the  nineteenth  century  to  the  legacy  of  the  French  Revolution 
and,  more  particularly,  to  the  category  of  "national  volunteers"  fighting 
for  liberty.  In  the  light  of  this  imaginary  genealogy,  recruitment  practices 
of  the  ancien  regime  have  been  dismissed  as  military  "enslavement"  by  a 
despotic  state.  The  outcome  was  obviously  the  construction  of  a  normative 
dichotomy  between  legitimate  and  illegitimate  forms  of  recruitment.  If  we 
take  a  closer  look  at  what  had  actually  been  going  on  in  terms  of  recruitment 
practices,  it  appears  in  many  cases  that  the  differences  between  the  earlier 
and  the  later  practices  were  less  important  than  commonly  believed.  On 
the  contrary,  there  is  a  great  deal  of  continuity  between  the  ancien  regime 
and  the  modern  republic. 

However,  the  analysis  should  not  stop  there.  It  is  obviously  not  the  same 
thing  to  serve  in  the  military  as  a  pressed  soldier  or  to  accomplish  one's  civic 
duty  through  military  service,  although  the  concrete  practices,  of  military 


420 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


drill  for  instance,  may,  from  another  point  of  view,  be  strictly  the  same.1 
This  example  clearly  shows  that  it  is  impossible  not  to  take  into  account  the 
historical  construction  of  the  meaning  that  is  attached  to  these  practices. 
In  other  words:  looking  at  different  forms  of  recruitment  with  a  historian's 
eye  implies  of  necessity  adopting  a  historical  perspective  with  regard  to 
the  taxonomic  categories  that  we  employ  to  describe  and  to  distinguish 
between  different  forms  of  military  labour. 

There  are  many  studies  of  the  military  history  of,  and  of  mobilization 
efforts  during,  the  French  Revolution  and  the  Prussian  reform  period,  but 
comparative  or  transnational  approaches  are  still  rare.  I  will  focus  the 
discussion  of  the  state  of  the  art  on  recent  works  and  those  that  appear  to 
contribute  to  the  theoretical  discussion.  Generally  speaking,  French  histori- 
ography has  never  abandoned  the  field  of  military  history  in  general  and  of 
the  revolutionary  levies  in  particular.  With  regard  to  the  wider  perspective, 
Eugen  Weber's  Peasants  into  Frenchmen  deserves  to  be  mentioned,  since 
it  considers  the  inner  colonization  of  the  French  countryside  in  the  period 
between  1871  and  1914  exclusively  and  positively  from  the  point  of  view  of 
the  central  power. 

The  general  problematique  of  how  to  conceive  the  role  of  military  service 
in  a  democracy  has  been  posed  chiefly  by  Torsten  Holm2  and  Eliot  Cohen3 
-  but  in  a  rather  aporetical  perspective4  -  from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
rational-choice  theory  of  democracy  by  Margaret  Levi,5  from  a  military 
point  of  view  by  Richard  Challener6  and  Maurice  Faivre,7  and  from  the  point 
of  view  of  moral  philosophy  by  Michael  Walzer.8  For  a  historical  inquiry, 
however,  these  works  may  be  regarded  as  not  very  helpful. 

On  the  methodological  level,  the  study  Le  corps  militaire  by  the  French 
sociologist  Alain  Ehrenberg  is,  by  contrast,  very  useful,  even  if  its  topic  is  not 
military  service  as  a  institution  in  itself.  The  specific  interest  of  Ehrenberg's 
work  lies  in  the  correlation  he  seeks  to  establish  between  military  drill 
and  democratic  citizenship,  thereby  questioning  the  validity  of  traditional 

1  Hippler,  Citizens,  Soldiers,  and  National  Armies,  p.  6. 

2  Holm,  Altgemeine  Wehrpflicht. 

3  Cohen,  Citizens  and  Soldiers. 

4  Cohen's  expression  may  be  considered  as  symptomatic  for  this  interpretative  dilemma:  if 
"military  service  touches  the  very  essence  of  a  polity"  this  is  because  it  "incorporates  some  of 
a  liberal-democratic  society's  most  precious  values  and  some  values  utterly  repugnant  to  it": 
ibid.,  pp.  33  and  35. 

5  Levi,  Consent,  Dissent,  and  Patriotism. 

6  Challener,  The  French  Theory  of  the  Nation  in  Arms. 

7  Faivre,  Les  nations  armees. 

8  Walzer,  Obligations,  esp.  "The  Obligation  to  Die  for  the  State",  pp.  77-98. 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


421 


dichotonomies  such  as  autonomy  and  power,  liberty  and  constraint,  self- 
government  and  obedience.  Democracy,  according  to  Ehrenberg,  sets  up  a 
particular  type  of  political  relationship  that  goes  beyond  traditional  distinc- 
tions between  those  who  command  and  those  who  obey  and  execute,  in 
favour  of  a  "tactic  that  aims  at  the  power  and  the  obedience  of  everybody". 
The  autonomy  of  the  individual  is  not  to  be  considered  solely  as  an  obstacle 
to  the  exercise  of  power,  but  at  the  same  time  as  its  "intermediary"  (relais): 

Autonomy  and  its  double  wording  (intermediary  and  obstacle)  ought 
to  be  reinscribed  into  the  mechanisms  of  power,  into  the  practice 
of  authority.  One  should  look  for  their  common  matrix  and  cease  to 
perceive  it  from  the  angle  of  the  figure  of  the  Other,  for  it  is  not  what  is 
outside  that  would  necessarily  and  objectively  do  harm  to  power,  but  a 
form  of  government  of  human  beings,  where  human  beings  are  incited 
to  govern  themselves.  Neither  disciplinary  nor  liberating  by  nature,  it 
is  an  element  in  a  system  of  relations.9 

The  essential  historical  work  of  the  armies  of  the  French  Revolution  remains 
Jean-Paul  Bertaud's  La  revolution  armee.  Inspired  by  this  fundamental 
work,  Bertaud's  followers,  such  as  Annie  Crepin, 10  Jean-Michel  Levy,11  Pierre 
Jacquot,12  or  recently  Bruno  Ciotti,13  have  studied  the  revolutionary  levies  on 
a  regional  level  more  closely,  providing  an  essential  basis  from  which  the 
perspective  can  eventually  be  geographically  enlarged.  Moreover,  the  factor 
of  desertion  may  said  to  be  well  documented,  mainly  due  to  the  works  by 
Alan  Forrest14  and  Frederic  Rousseau.15  The  German  and  the  French  Offices 
for  Military  History  published  both  collective  volumes  on  the  history  of 
conscription,  giving  a  very  large  chronological  overview  on  the  topic.  The 
French  volume,  edited  by  Maurice  Vai'sse,  contains  foremost  a  contribution 
by  Jean  Delmas,  who  gives  a  useful  summary  of  the  French  debates  on 
compulsory  military  service  and  the  lottery  draft  during  the  nineteenth 
century.16 


9  Ehrenberg,  Le  corps  militaire,  p.  173. 

10  Crepin,  "Levees  d'hommes  et  esprit  public  en  Seine-et-Marne". 

11  Levy,  "La  formation  de  la  premiere  armee  de  la  Revolution  francaise". 

12  Jacquot,  "Les  Bataillons  de  volontaires  en  Haute-Marne". 

13  Ciotti,  Du  volontaire  au  consent. 

14  Forrest,  Conscripts  and  Deserters. 

15  Rousseau,  Service  militaire  au  XIXe  siecle. 

16  Delmas,  "L'armee  franchise  au  XIXe  siecle". 


422 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


Some  recent  publications  deserve  a  closer  discussion.  Being  not  a  schol- 
arly historical  study  but  rather  an  essay  -  relying  exclusively  on  secondary 
literature  -  Michel  Auvray's  book  L'dge  des  casernes  analyses  military 
service  as  being  in  historical  continuity  with  much  older  obligations  to 
the  state,  and  its  revolutionary  origin  nothing  more  than  a  "myth".  Annie 
Crepin's  book  La  conscription  en  debat,  on  the  other  hand,  is  essentially 
based  on  "macro-sources",  such  as  parliamentary  debates,  proposals  for 
laws,  and  newspaper  articles.  The  same  author  has  recently  broadened 
the  perspective  with  the  publication  of  Defendre  La  France,  which  takes 
into  account  the  reactions  and  attitudes  of  civil  society  towards  military 
obligation,  and  Histoire  de  la  conscription  which  sums  up  the  author's  work 
of  many  decades  and  widens  the  chronological  horizon  to  the  twentieth 
century.  Crepin  is  the  most  accomplished  expert  on  the  matter  in  France 
and  provides  a  very  useful  framework  of  the  political  debates  of  the  period. 
There  are,  however,  also  decisive  shortcomings  in  her  analyses,  inasmuch 
as  she  remains  firmly  grounded  in  the  tradition  of  French  republican  and 
"Jacobin"  historiography  and  thus  has  a  tendency  to  accept  too  readily  the 
conceptual  grounds  of  this  tradition.  With  the  methods  of  the  historical 
anthropology,  Odile  Roynette  has  analysed  the  "experience  of  the  barracks" 
in  France  at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  with  an  impressive  mastery 
of  source  material  and  according  to  an  interesting  problematique,  insisting 
on  the  conscripts'  processes  of  adaptation  to  the  social  microcosms  of  the 
army  and  the  impact  of  the  institution  to  the  shaping  of  national  and  gender 
attitudes.17 

Recruitment  practices  of  the  ancien  regime 

At  least  since  1583  the  right  to  raise  troops  has  been  codified  as  a  royal 
prerogative.18  The  construction  of  a  centralized  state  in  France  went  hand 
in  hand  with  the  nationalization  of  the  armed  forces;  private  armies  and  the 
personal  possession  of  weapons  gradually  disappeared,  to  the  advantage  of 
central  power.  In  the  case  of  eighteenth-century  France,  the  institutional 
situation  of  recruitment  was  extremely  complex;  different  and  even  con- 
tradictory practices  coexisted  over  a  long  period.  Three  different  stages  of 
recruitment  policy  in  pre-revolutionary  France,  however,  can  be  roughly 
distinguished:  (1)  feudal  recruitment,  (2)  "touting",  and  (3)  militia  incor- 

17  Roynette,  "Boris  pour  le  Service". 

18  The  following  paragraphs  rely  mainly  on  Hippler,  Citizens,  pp.  13-27  and  46-76. 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


423 


porations  and  "national  recruitment".  However,  chronological  boundaries 
between  these  stages  were  by  no  means  clear  and  are  distinguished  here 
only  for  the  sake  of  clarity 

Despite  the  1583  act,  the  king  did  not  raise  his  troops  directly.  Character- 
istically, having  first  deprived  the  aristocracy  of  the  right  to  keep  troops,  the 
central  power  delegated  the  raising  of  troops  back  to  them.19  The  military 
administration  chose  the  colonels  -  generally  nobles  -  who  were  charged 
with  raising  and  maintaining  regiments.  In  principle,  the  central  power 
thus  did  not  provide  regiments  with  soldiers;  instead,  enrolment  was  the 
task  of  the  officers,  who  were  virtually  "proprietors"  of  their  corps.  Recruit- 
ment was  thus  a  "private"  contract  between  a  soldier  and  an  officer,  relying 
on  existing  feudal  bonds,  which  meant  that  soldiers  generally  came  from 
among  the  officer's  dependent  peasantry.  This  kind  of  personal  recruitment 
had  certain  advantages.  The  military  hierarchy  and  social  structure  exactly 
reflect  the  social  relations  between  local  lords  and  their  peasants.  They 
knew  each  other  and  they  were  bound  by  a  system  of  mutual  obligations. 
And,  last  but  not  least,  the  desertion  rate  was  comparatively  low  with  this 
kind  of  recruitment  system.20  However,  this  feudal  recruitment  also  had 
certain  limits.  In  times  of  war,  in  particular,  it  appeared  to  be  impossible 
to  significantly  increase  the  strength  of  the  army  without  other  methods 
of  enrolment. 

Having  exhausted  the  resources  of  personal  recruitment,  officers  were 
forced  to  enlist  soldiers  they  did  not  personally  know  and  with  whom 
they  had  no  relation  in  civil  society.  This  kind  of  recruitment  is  generally 
called  "touting"  (racolage).  The  difference  between  feudal  recruitment  and 
racolage  can  be  summarized  in  the  following  way:  in  the  case  of  feudal 
recruitment,  the  soldier  was  enlisted  by  an  officer,  whereas  in  the  case  of 
touting  he  was  hired  as  a  soldier.  The  procedure,  however,  was  not  different 
in  form,  since  drafting  was  still  the  affair  of  the  commander  of  the  unit. 
In  contrast  to  the  procedure  of  feudal  recruitment,  the  officers  usually 
touted  outside  their  home  towns  or  regions.  In  contrast  to  personal  and 
feudal  staffing,  "touting"  allowed  enrolments  to  be  increased  considerably; 
this  kind  of  practice,  however,  turned  out  to  be  problematic,  too.  The  more 
difficulty  the  recruiters  had  in  finding  soldiers,  the  more  they  were  forced 
to  compete  with  each  other,  and  the  more  they  were  tempted  to  use  violence 
or  tricks  in  order  to  find  recruits. 


19  See  Andre,  Michel Le  Tellier  et  I'organisation  del'armee  monarchique. 

20  Corvisier,  L'armeefrancaise  de  la  fin  du  XVIIe  siecle  au  ministere  de  Choiseul,  I,  p.  736. 


424 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


There  was,  however,  another  military  institution,  one  that  truly  came 
under  the  control  of  the  central  government:  the  Royal  Militia.  The  militia 
had  been  established  as  a  regular  institution  under  the  Marquis  de  Louvois, 
the  minister  of  war,  in  November  1688.  In  reality,  militia  systems  had  existed 
since  the  Middle  Ages  under  various  labels;  their  principle  was  the  mobiliza- 
tion of  peasants  under  the  command  of  the  lord  in  wartime."  A  militia 
system,  in  the  traditional  sense  of  the  term,  thus  involved  the  duty  to  fight 
for  the  defence  of  the  community  in  the  case  of  danger;  it  did  not  involve, 
however,  a  regular  military  service.  The  feudal  militia  was  disbanded  as 
soon  as  a  war  was  over.  Moreover,  a  certain  number  of  particular  militia 
institutions  coexisted  until  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century.  There  were, 
in  the  first  place,  the  milices  bourgeoises  formed  by  inhabitants  of  towns. 
Their  first  purpose  was  to  maintain  public  order,  i.e.  they  were  a  municipal 
police  force.  Occasionally,  however,  they  were  used  as  auxiliaries  for  the 
regular  army.  By  the  end  of  the  century,  though,  the  burghers  tended  in- 
creasingly to  pay  a  substitute  instead  of  themselves  serving  in  the  militia; 
they  were,  however,  opposed  to  any  attempt  to  abolish  the  institution  that 
they  considered  as  the  expression  of  the  cities'  political  liberty.  When  the 
Royal  Militia  came  into  being  in  1688,  its  organization  differed  considerably 
from  these  predecessors.  First,  it  was  raised  in  the  name  of  the  king  and  not 
by  local  lords.  Secondly,  it  was  conceived  of  as  a  kind  of  standing  auxiliary 
army  that  gathered  even  in  peacetime  and  was  regularly  employed  in  wars, 
and  not  only  at  particular  critical  moments.  The  Royal  Militia  was  recruited 
by  a  conscription  system,  which  was  very  unpopular.  As  a  result  of  the 
opposition  of  public  opinion,  compulsory  conscription  in  the  militia  was 
abolished  in  1697,  re-established  in  1701,  abolished  once  again  in  1712,  and 
then,  in  1726,  definitively  institutionalized." 

Only  a  small  proportion  of  those  who  were  potentially  subject  to  the 
militia  were  actually  conscripted,  and  the  choice  of  those  who  had  to  serve 
was  obviously  subject  to  serious  quarrels.  In  most  cases  a  lottery  system 
was  adopted,  but  large  segments  of  society  benefited  from  legal  exemptions, 
both  personal  and  statutory.  Moreover,  in  the  course  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury the  legislation  on  exemptions  became  increasingly  complex.  Service 
in  the  militia  being  not  a  personal,  but  a  communal  duty,  it  became  normal 
to  collect  money  in  the  parish  before  the  lottery  day;  this  was  then  handed 
over  to  the  chosen  militiaman.  This  money  was,  on  the  one  hand,  a  kind  of 
compensation  for  serving  the  community  and,  on  the  other,  a  contribution 

21  Corvisier,  Armees  etsocietes  en  Europe,  pp.  36-57. 

22  Gebelin,  Histoire  des  milices  provinciales  (r688-rygr). 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


425 


to  the  costs  of  the  uniform  and  equipment.  The  existence  of  this  kind  of 
practice  induced  the  government  to  make  this  contribution  obligatory. 

Another  development  needs  to  be  highlighted.  Traditionally,  the  militia 
and  the  line  army  were  strictly  separate  organizational  institutions.  From 
1701,  though,  when  military  service  in  the  militia  was  re-established,  the 
government  gradually  changed  its  military  policy  towards  assimilation 
between  the  militia  and  the  line  army.  From  then  on,  each  militia  battalion 
was  attached  to  a  regiment  of  the  line  army.  The  militia  units  were  now 
labelled  "second  battalion"  and  designed  to  assist  the  "first  battalion"  in 
tactical  matters.  The  militia  thus  increasingly  became  a  recruitment  pool 
for  the  regular  army.  With  regard  to  the  kind  of  recruitment,  the  difference 
between  the  "volunteer"  recruitment  of  the  line  army  and  the  "conscription" 
of  the  militia  was  eroded  by  the  actual  situation  on  the  ground:  militiamen 
and  soldiers  of  the  standing  army  were  pressed.  The  line  army  was  recruited 
to  a  great  extent  among  conscripts,  while  the  newly  raised  militia  units 
consisted  exclusively  of  "touted"  volunteers.  In  this  way,  the  dissimilarity 
between  the  conscripted  militia  corps  as  auxiliary  military  forces,  on  the 
one  hand,  and  the  regular  army  with  volunteer  recruitment,  on  the  other, 
gradually  faded  away.23  Simultaneously,  the  functions  of  the  state's  military 
administration  increased,  which  meant  that  recruitment  became  directly 
governed  by  state  authorities  and  not  by  relatively  autonomous  army  of- 
ficers. 

The  ultimate  step  towards  a  centralized  system  of  military  recruitment 
before  the  French  Revolution  can  be  dated  to  the  ordinance  of  10  December 
1762  stating  that  "the  king  charges  himself  with  recruiting".  The  basic 
characteristic  of  these  "national"  or  "royal  recruits"  was  that  they  were 
enlisted  not  for  a  particular  unit,  or  by  a  particular  officer,  but  as  soldiers 
for  the  army  in  general.  Centralized  state  apparatuses  like  the  intendances 
of  the  provinces  were  charged  with  recruitment,  and  a  refined  system  of 
bureaucratic  control  was  set  up  in  order  to  co-ordinate  large-scale  recruit- 
ment operations. 

The  French  Revolution  and  the  Napoleonic  period 

Confronted  with  these  eighteenth-century  developments,  the  innovations 
in  matters  of  military  recruitment  in  the  early  years  of  the  French  Revolution 
seem  rather  insignificant.  From  July  1789  the  bourgeoisie  had  reorganized 

23   Corvisier,  L'armeefrangaise  de  iafin  du  XVIIe  siecle  au  ministere  de  Choiseul,  I,  p.  247. 


426 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


their  own  militia  troops  as  the  National  Guard,  partly  in  order  to  back 
the  National  Assembly  in  its  struggle  to  impose  its  own  political  agenda 
against  the  monarchy  and  partly  in  order  to  uphold  domestic  security.24  This 
second  role,  however,  was  rather  dubious,  since  National  Guardsmen  took 
part  in  popular  uprisings  and  in  looting.25  In  theory,  only  "active  citizens" 
and  sons  of  active  citizens  -  that  is,  those  who  had  a  material  interest  in 
public  affairs  -  should  be  allowed  to  be  armed  as  members  of  the  National 
Guard,  but  the  practice  was  much  less  clear-cut.26  In  some  regions,  the 
Guard's  social  composition  was  much  less  bourgeois  than  it  should  have 
been  according  to  the  legal  dispositions.27  In  other  cases,  the  legal  disposi- 
tions were  politically  challenged  by  excluded  social  groups,  such  as  the 
Parisian  servants  who  in  1789  claimed  a  universal  human  right  to  serve  in 
the  National  Guard28  or  the  feminist  Societe  des  citoyennes  republicaines 
revolutionnaires  who  addressed  a  petition  to  the  National  Assembly  in  1792, 
demanding  the  creation  of  a  "female  national  guard".29  In  short,  service  in 
the  National  Guard  was  intimately  linked  to  the  question  of  civic  rights  and 
as  such  became  a  subject  of  political  quarrel. 

In  December  1789,  the  National  Assembly  rejected  a  request  made  by 
republicans  to  establish  a  system  of  universal  conscription.  After  a  week 
of  passionate  debate  the  Assembly  decreed,  on  16  December  1789,  that 
"French  troops,  of  all  kinds,  other  than  National  Guards  and  Militia,  will  be 
recruited  by  voluntary  engagement."30  Conscription  was  rejected  in  favour 
of  voluntary  recruitment.  The  general  structure  of  the  regular  army  was  to 
remain  more  or  less  the  same:  executive  power  over  the  army  was  in  the 
hands  of  the  king,  military  service  was  rejected,  and  the  term  of  service 
clasted  eight  years  with  the  possibility  of  extending  that  period.  More 
particularly,  the  age  limit  for  enlisting  was  fixed  at  sixteen.  Furthermore, 
the  actual  procedure  of  recruitment  was  revised:  recruiters  were  to  work 
only  in  their  home  district  so  that  they  were  under  the  control  of  their 
fellow  citizens,  which  was  supposed  to  prevent  the  notorious  disorders  of 

24  Soboul,  La  Revolution frangaise,  p.  152. 

25  Devenne,  "La  garde  nationale",  p.  49. 

26  Arches,  "Aspects  sociaux  de  quelques  gardes  nationales",  pp.  255-266. 

27  For  a  detailed  regional  analyses  see  the  contributions  in  the  third  part  (pp.  267-409)  of 
Bianchi  and  Dupuy  (eds),  La  Garde  nationale  entre  nation  et people  en  armes. 

28  Petition  des  Personnes  en  etat  de  Domesticite  du  District  de  I'lsle-Saint-Louis  a  messieurs 
les  Representans  de  la  Commune,  Paris,  1789.  See  also  Genty,  "Controverses  autour  de  la  garde 
nationale  parisienne",  p.  65. 

29  Leon,  Adresse  individuelle  a  I'Assemblee  nationale.  See  also  Godineau,  Citoyennes  Tricoteuses, 
p.  119. 

30  Le  Moniteur  no.  116,  vol.  2,  p.  400. 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


427 


traditional  recruitment.  Another  important  point  was  the  nationalization 
of  the  army:  only  Frenchmen  were  to  be  recruited  into  the  French  corps.31 
This  principle,  however,  did  not  include  the  foreign  corps  of  the  army,  but 
French  and  foreign  corps  had  to  be  separated.  Finally,  soldiers  would  lose 
their  civic  rights  for  the  duration  of  the  engagement. 

The  outcome  of  the  debate  was  thus  an  attempt  to  make  recruitment  into 
the  army  morally  acceptable,  without  changing  its  structure  or  the  general 
patterns  of  staffing.  The  long  term  of  service,  the  possibility  of  joining  the 
army  at  the  age  of  sixteen,  the  maintenance  of  foreign  corps,  and  the  loss  of 
civic  rights  for  soldiers  explicitly  kept  the  armed  forces  at  a  certain  distance 
from  civil  society.  The  third  estate,  furthermore,  did  not  try  to  destroy  the 
supreme  power  of  the  king  over  the  state  and  the  army,  and  contented  itself 
with  the  recognition  of  the  National  Guard  as  the  expression  and  guarantee 
of  bourgeois  participation  in  political  matters. 

It  was  war,  or  the  imminence  of  war,  that  brought  about  an  evolution 
in  the  patterns  of  recruitment.  After  having  tried  in  vain  to  enlist  100,000 
volunteers  into  the  regular  army,  the  Assembly  decided,  in  June  1791,  to  or- 
ganize battalions  of  "national  volunteers"  from  the  members  of  the  National 
Guard.  The  decree  affirmed  clearly  that  these  measures  were  limited  to  the 
time  in  which  "the  situation  of  the  state  required  extraordinary  service".32 
Being  such  an  extraordinary  military  force  obviously  meant  that  the  forms 
of  organization  and  military  discipline  had  to  differ  considerably  from 
those  in  use  in  the  line  army.  In  this  respect  the  most  important  feature 
was  certainly  the  question  of  officers.  The  way  officers  were  chosen  was  the 
same  as  in  the  National  Guard:  that  is,  soldiers  had  the  right  to  elect  their 
commanders.  The  government  issued  various  calls  for  volunteers  during 
the  following  years,  and  the  whole  culminated  in  the  1793  levee  en  masse, 
which  has  become  a  myth  in  French  national  historiography.33  In  theory 
each  citizen  was  liable,  but  the  exceptions  were  so  numerous  that  the  levee 
en  masse  by  no  means  established  general  conscription.34  Moreover,  this 
civic  call  to  the  colours  was  clearly  presented  as  an  extraordinary  event  that 
was  not  meant  to  be  translated  into  permanent  institutional  reality.  The 
word  "levee"  has  several  meanings:  it  connoted  the  ideas  of  both  "levy"  and 

31  Bouthillier,  Rapport  sur  le  recrutement,  les  engagements,  les  rengagements  et  les  conges, 
pp.  10-15. 

32  "Decret  relatif  a  une  conscription  libre  de  gardes  nationales  de  bonne  volonte  dans  la 
proportion  de  unsurvingt",  printed  inDeprez,  Les  volontaires  nationaux  (1791-1793),  p.  101. 

33  On  the  myth  of  the  "national  volunteers",  see  Hippler,  "Volunteers  of  the  French  Revolution- 
ary Wars". 

34  Auvray,  L'dge  des  casernes,  p.  42,  and  Jean-Paul  Bertaud,  La  revolution  armee,  p.  100. 


428 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


"uprising".  The  recruitment  of  troops,  which  is  one  of  the  main  prerogatives 
of  central  power,  and  revolt  are  put  on  the  same  level.  The  oxymoron  both 
affirms  and  denies  state  power.  The  idea  for  a  levee  en  masse  occurred 
during  the  spring  of  1793  in  the  highly  politicized  milieus  of  the  Parisian 
sans-culottes,35  and  it  was  part  of  their  plan  for  political  terror.36  Sebastien 
Lacroix,  one  of  the  main  ideologists  of  the  levee  en  masse,  recommended 
a  vast  political  programme  that  involved  stockpiling  food  in  Paris,  fixing 
prices  for  foodstuffs,  monitoring  public  opinion,  and  co-ordinating  a  huge 
propaganda  effort.  This  particular  situation  which  would  "decide  the  fate 
of  the  world"  imposed  a  general  mobilization  of  a  very  short  duration:  "eight 
days  of  enthusiasm  may  be  more  efficient  for  the  fatherland  than  eight 
years  of  battle".37 

The  idea  of  a  levee  en  masse  and  the  politics  of  terror  were  only  reluc- 
tantly adopted  by  the  Jacobin  government  under  popular  pressure,  and  the 
concrete  measures  taken  differed  considerably  from  the  intentions  of  the 
promoters  of  the  idea.  Most  importantly,  the  levee  en  masse  was  transformed 
into  a  requisition:  instead  of  an  anarchic  seizure  of  sovereign  power  by 
insurrectionists,  it  was,  on  the  contrary,  the  state  that  "seized"  individuals 
for  service  in  the  army.  In  this  respect,  the  mythical  levee  en  masse  actually 
prefigured  some  of  the  constitutive  paradoxes  of  republican  conscription. 

Most  of  the  "national  volunteers"  were  very  young  men.38  A  majority  of 
them  came  from  urban  areas.39  In  terms  of  their  social  origin,  the  petty  and 
lower  bourgeoisie  were  well  represented,  and  artisans  and  journeymen  were 
over-represented.40  What  actually  happened  during  the  following  years  was 
that  the  soldiers  who  were  already  enlisted  were  kept  under  the  colours  for 
many  years,  in  most  cases  against  their  will.  On  the  other  hand,  the  turnover 
of  the  military  personnel  was  particularly  high  in  these  years  -  in  1792,  for 
instance,  more  than  a  third  of  the  soldiers  had  served  less  than  one  year. 
Moreover,  the  emigration  of  officers,  most  of  them  nobles,  enabled  those 
who  were  left  to  make  very  quick  career  progression.41  People  from  lower 
social  origins  could  attain  positions  of  command  that  had  been  almost 

35  Soboul,  Les  sans-culottes  parisiens  en  fan  II,  p.  110. 

36  Guerin,  La  lutte  de  classes  sous  la  Premiere  Republique. 

37  Lacroix,  Pas  un  moment  a  perdre,  pp.  12-13. 

38  In  their  ranks,  79  per  cent  were  younger  than  twenty-five.  In  the  Ain  department,  249  of  544 
soldiers  raised  in  1791  were  younger  than  twenty  (Levy,  "La  formation  de  la  premiere  armee  de 
la  Revolution  franchise",  p.  115). 

39  Jacquot,  "Les  Bataillons  de  volontaires"  pp.  84-94. 

40  Bertaud,  La  revolution  armee,  pp.  67-68. 

41  Ibid.,  p.  77. 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


429 


exclusively  reserved  for  nobles  a  couple  of  years  earlier:  the  armies  of  the 
French  Revolution  and  of  the  Napoleonic  empire  were  thus  a  very  powerful 
mechanism  for  upward  mobility. 

Nonetheless,  in  1798,  the  needs  of  the  war  effort  induced  the  government 
to  issue  a  law  on  conscription.4*  According  to  the  deputy  -  later  Marshall 
-  Jourdan  who  presented  the  proposal  in  parliament,  the  law  aimed  less  at 
creating  new  political  forms  than  at  institutionalizing  the  experience  of 
the  Revolution.43  The  project,  however,  was  also  quite  moderate  and  tried 
explicitly  to  avoid  a  militarization  of  society.  There  were  thus  two  contra- 
dicting goals  to  be  achieved:  on  the  one  hand,  Jourdan  advocated  "universal 
service",  essentially  because  partiality  would  have  had  a  negative  impact  on 
the  social  acceptability  of  military  service;  on  the  other,  he  strived  to  limit 
the  burden  of  conscription  by  enlisting  only  the  number  of  soldiers  that  was 
necessary  for  the  army  and  not  all  available  individuals.44  The  solution  to 
this  conundrum  was  found  in  the  distinction  between  "conscription"  and 
"military  service":  conscription  meant  that  the  individual  was  registered  as 
a  potential  conscript,  but  this  did  not  imply  that  that  all  these  conscripts 
had  to  do  military  service.  "Many  will  be  destined  to  serve,  but  in  reality  few 
will  probably  serve",  as  Jourdan  put  it.45  The  criterion  by  which  the  soldiers 
were  chosen  from  the  mass  of  conscripts  was  their  age,  which  meant  that 
the  youngest  of  a  class  were  enlisted  first.  The  law,  however,  did  not  fix  the 
length  of  service,  and  decisions  about  the  discharge  of  soldiers  were  left  to 
the  government. 

Unsurprisingly,  opinions  were  divided  about  the  conditions  for  exemp- 
tions and  about  the  question  of  whether  conscripts  should  be  allowed  to 
hire  a  substitute  instead  of  doing  military  service  personally.  The  1798  law 
did  not  actually  allow  substitution,  since  the  goal  was  that  "the  law  pen- 
etrates the  thatched  cottages  of  the  poor  as  well  as  the  sumptuous  palaces 
of  opulence".46  This  settlement,  however,  was  discussed  again  two  years 
later  and  substitution  allowed.  What  is  interesting  about  this  discussion 
was  the  fact  that  similar  arguments,  which  had  been  brought  forward  in 
1798  to  justify  the  act  of  conscription  and  the  interdiction  of  substitution, 
now  served  as  arguments for  substitution.  What  is  more,  the  adjustment  of 
military  duties  to  the  needs  of  "arts,  commerce,  and  agriculture"  in  Jourdan's 

42  On  the  1798  legislation,  see  Crepin,  La  conscription  en  debat,  pp.  24-30. 

43  See  Laveaux,  Rapport fait  par  Et.  Laveaux,  p.  12. 

44  Jourdan,  Rapport  fait  par fourdan,  p.  4. 

45  Ibid.,  p.  6. 

46  Porte,  Opinion  de  Porte  sur  le  projetde  resolution,  p.  8. 


430 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


project  was  translated  into  a  criticism  of  "those  lovers  of  a  chimerical 
equality"  who  wanted  to  "force  all  the  members  of  a  big  nation  strictly  to 
do  the  same  work".47  The  "general  interest"  could  serve  as  an  argument  not 
only  for  an  equal  obligation  for  everybody,  but  also  for  a  differentiation  of 
social  tasks,  that  is,  for  the  possibility  for  the  rich  to  buy  themselves  out 
of  the  obligation  by  hiring  a  substitute.  The  privilege,  however,  was  also 
justified  as  salutary  for  the  poor:  "the  option  of  substitution  will  allow 
the  poor  to  receive  money".48  The  legislative  basis  for  French  recruitment 
policy  was  rather  elastic:  on  the  one  hand,  military  obligation  was  conceived 
as  a  consequence  of  citizenship,  and  the  recruitment  model  can  thus  be 
described  as  conscription;  on  the  other  hand,  the  law  could  be  interpreted 
as  authorizing  the  forced  recruitment  of  a  selected  number  of  individuals 
with  the  possibility  given  to  the  wealthy  to  buy  themselves  out. 

The  1798  law  was  the  legislative  basis  for  the  recruitment  of  Napoleon's 
army.  As  regional  studies  have  shown,  the  rates  of  desertion  and  refusal  of 
military  service  (insub ordination)43  were  extremely  high:  up  to  90  per  cent 
in  many  cases.50  Socially,  deserters  and  insoumis  came  mainly  from  rural 
regions,  and  were  well  integrated  into  society.  Families  and  rural  communi- 
ties helped  deserters  and  insoumis  escaping  from  the  military.  It  was  easier 
to  enforce  conscription  in  urban  areas,  and  in  this  respect  the  social  pattern 
of  staffing  remained  the  same  during  the  Revolution  and  the  Napoleonic 
period.  In  order  to  fulfil  the  military  needs,  Napoleonic  authorities  set  up 
specific  military  corps  for  searching  the  countryside  and  hunting  deserters. 
Moreover,  many  of  the  peace  treaties  during  the  period  obliged  Napoleon's 
"allies"  to  contribute  to  the  war  effort  of  the  empire.  As  a  result,  about  a 
third  of  the  soldiers  in  the  Russian  campaign  were  not  French.51  Finally, 
from  1808  onwards,  "extraordinary  levies"  were  organized  in  order  to  meet 
the  enormous  manpower  needs  of  Napoleon's  campaigns.  In  the  ten-year 
period  1804-1814,  between  2,000,000  and  2,400,000  Frenchmen  were  enlisted 


47  Jaucourt,  Opinion  de Jaucourt  Sur  le  projet  de  loi,  p.  3. 

48  Delpierre,  Opinion  de  Delpierre  (jeune),  p.  4. 

49  Deserters  are  those  who,  after  becoming  soldiers,  leave  the  army  without  permission, 
whereas  insoumis  means  those  who  refuse  enlistment  altogether. 

50  See  Rousseau,  Service  militaire  au  XIXe  siecle. 

51  On  German  soldiers  in  Napoleon's  army,  see  Hippler,  "Les  soldats  allemands  dans  l'armee 
napoleonienne  d'apres  leurs  autobiographies". 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


431 


by  conscription,52  and  many  of  them  died  or  were  injured.53  Among  those 
enlisted,  only  about  52,000  were  actual  volunteers.54  Unsurprisingly,  the 
social  impact  of  twenty-five  years  of  revolutionary  and  imperial  mass 
warfare  was  enormous.55 

The  constitutional  monarchies  and  the  Second  Empire 

After  Waterloo,  and  the  massive  desertions  that  had  followed  Napoleon's 
ultimate  defeat,  King  Louis  XVIII  disbanded  the  remainder  of  the  army  and 
on  3  August  1815  decreed  the  formation  of  one  "legion"  in  each  department. 
Between  1814  and  1818  the  recruits  for  the  royal  French  army  were  exclu- 
sively volunteers,  many  of  them  in  reality  veterans  of  the  old  imperial  army. 
The  "Constitutional  Charter"  of  the  reformed  French  monarchy  stipulated 
that  "conscription  is  abolished".  A  couple  of  years  later,  however,  in  1818,  a 
form  of  compulsory  military  service  was  re-established.  The  reason  was 
that  the  military  authorities  failed  to  enlist  more  than  3,500  men  a  year, 
which  was  insufficient  to  meet  manpower  needs.56  On  the  other  hand,  it 
was  argued  that  the  difficulty  of  finding  recruits  on  the  labour  market 
was  mainly  due  to  the  government's  unwillingness  to  provide  adequate 
funding.57  Conscription  was  viewed  as  a  cheap  way  of  manning  the  army. 
Amended  in  1824  and  in  1832,  the  1818  legislation  remained  the  basis  of 
French  recruitment  policies  until  the  Third  Republic.58  Beyond  the  purely 
military  concerns,  the  question  of  recruitment  was  linked  to  a  whole  series 
of  uncertainties  about  the  nature  of  the  political  regime,  about  political 
culture,  and  about  the  relationship  of  the  re-established  monarchy  to  the 
revolutionary  past.  This  relationship  to  the  past  was  particularly  difficult  in 
post-1815  France,  and  two  quite  different  sets  of  memory  politics  confronted 

52  Girardet,  La  societe  militaire  de  1875  a  nos jours,  p.  19.  See  also  Smets,  "Von  der  'Dorfidylle' 
zur  preuKischen  Nation",  p.  717.  Quantitative  aspects  of  the  social  impact  of  conscription  can  be 
found  in  the  "Compte  general  de  la  conscription"  by  Antoine-Audet  Hargenvilliers,  published 
in  Vallee,  La  conscription  dans  le  department  de  la  Charente  (1798-1807).  More  recent  scholarship 
has  shown  that  the  figures  given  by  Hargenvilliers  are  sometimes  flawed;  see  Rousseau,  Service 
militaire  au  XLXe  siecle,  and  Dufraisse,  Napoleon,  p.  69. 

53  See  Houdaille,  "Le  probleme  des  pertes  de  guerre". 

54  Girardet,  La  societe  militaire,  p.  20. 

55  On  the  social  impact  during  the  nineteenth  century  see  Petiteau,  Lendemains  d'Empire. 

56  Monteilhet,  Les  institutions  militaires  de  la  France,  p.  5. 

57  Vidalenc,  "Engages  et  conscrits  sous  la  Restauration  1814-1830",  p.  240.  See  also  Vidalenc, 
"Les  engagements  volontaires  dans  l'armee  de  la  Restauration". 

58  Porch,  "The  French  Army  Law  of  1832". 


432 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


each  other:  an  official  effort  to  forget  the  Revolution  and  the  empire  (unite 
et  oubli,  "unity  and  forgetting",  was  the  imprint  on  official  papers)  and  a 
discourse  of  atonement,  promoted  by  the  "ultras"  of  the  Restoration.59  The 
military  in  general  and  conscription  in  particular  were  universally  viewed 
as  cornerstones  of  the  republic  and  of  its  continuity  in  Napoleon's  empire.60 

According  to  a  proposal  by  Laurent  de  Gouvion-Saint-Cyr,  an  annual 
contingent  of  40,000  men  would  be  raised  by  voluntary  recruitment  or,  if 
not  enough  volunteers  were  forthcoming,  by  a  draft  operated  through  a 
lottery.  The  duration  of  active  service  being  six  years,  the  general  strength 
of  the  army  would  be  240,000  men.  These  numbers,  however,  were  only  a 
maximum,  which  was  subject  to  budgetary  constraints;  that  is,  the  actual 
strength  of  the  army  and  the  annual  levies  could  in  reality  be  lower  and  the 
effective  duration  of  service  shorter.  In  1824  the  duration  of  active  service 
was  increased  to  eight  years  from  six,  which  further  contributed  to  the 
professionalization  of  the  conscript  system:  after  many  years  in  the  army 
many  conscripts  had  no  other  professional  choice  than  to  "voluntarily" 
remain  soldiers.  In  this  sense,  and  in  the  eyes  of  many  contemporaries, 
"conscription"  was  little  more  than  a  legal  framework  for  forced  enlistments 
into  a  professional  army.  Moreover,  the  system  allowed  the  possibility  of 
hiring  a  substitute,  which  was  obviously  a  possibility  offered  to  the  wealthy 
to  buy  themselves  out  of  the  military  obligation. 

In  terms  of  the  social  origins  of  the  soldiers,  the  army  of  the  Restoration 
comprised  two  rather  different  sections.  The  bulk  of  the  soldiers  were 
veterans  of  the  Napoleonic  army,  in  particular  those  who  had  lost  any 
contact  with  their  home  communities.  In  contrast,  those  who  were  recruited 
after  1815  came  to  a  very  large  extent  from  poor  rural  backgrounds.  This  led 
to  quite  an  unusual  ideological  configuration:  the  political  right  and  the 
liberal  bourgeoisie  were  suspicious  of  the  military,  whereas  those  who  were 
nostalgic  about  the  Revolution  and  the  empire  upheld  the  image  of  France's 
past  military  glory.  In  contrast  to  the  social  habits  of  the  ancien  regime,  the 
aristocracy  of  the  Restoration  and  the  July  Monarchy  was  reluctant  to  follow 
military  careers.  According  to  the  1818  law  and  similar  stipulations  in  1832, 
two-thirds  of  the  officers  should  have  been  recruited  through  the  military 
colleges  of  Saint-Cyr  and  Metz.  However,  the  number  of  those  who  passed 
the  entrance  exams  of  these  colleges  and  who  were  able  to  pay  for  tuition 
and  equipment  was  notoriously  lower  than  the  military  needs.  As  a  result 


59  See  Elster,  Closing  the  Books,  pp.  24-47. 

60  See  Hippler,  "Conscription  in  the  French  Restoration". 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


433 


of  this,  nearly  two-thirds  of  officers  were  in  reality  non-commissioned 
officers  and  thus  former  rank-and-file.61 

The  army  in  other  words,  still  functioned  to  some  extent  as  a  mechanism 
of  upward  mobility  during  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century62  How- 
ever, in  contrast  to  the  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic  periods,  this  upward 
mobility  was  extremely  slow  and  of  little  attraction  in  financial  terms.  It 
usually  took  seven  to  eight  years  to  get  promoted  from  second  lieutenant  to 
lieutenant  and  the  same  amount  of  time  to  get  promoted  from  lieutenant 
to  captain.  Most  officers  ended  their  military  careers  ended  as  captains 
after  some  twenty  years  as  lieutenants.  As  a  result  of  this,  very  few  young 
bourgeois  enlisted;  instead  they  preferred  careers  in  civil  administration,  in 
the  liberal  professions,  or  in  business.  During  the  mid-nineteenth  century 
non-commissioned  officers  earned  between  75  centimes  and  1  franc  a  day, 
whereas  the  average  daily  salary  of  industrial  workers  was  about  2  francs, 
which  was  itself  already  notoriously  insufficient.  As  for  lieutenants,  their 
salary  was  between  4.5  and  5.5  francs  a  day  and  their  pension  between 
2  and  3.2  francs.  In  other  words,  the  military  held  no  attraction  for  the 
bourgeoisie,  and  salaries  hardly  allowed  a  man  to  ensure  a  decent  life  for  his 
family.  Moreover,  the  cultural  image  of  the  military  was  of  little  attraction. 

The  spirit  of  the  time  being  understood  as  pacifistic  and  commercial, 
military  life  was  depicted  in  contemporary  literature  as  tedious  waiting 
in  some  provincial  garrison  for  a  war  that  was  never  to  come.  Apart  from 
colonial  expansion  after  1830,  the  main  task  for  the  military  was  actually 
domestic  counter-insurgency.  Given  the  social  composition  of  the  army, 
it  was  obviously  necessary  to  prevent  fraternization  between  soldiers  and 
insurgents.  From  the  point  of  view  of  recruitment,  care  was  taken  to  enlist 
primarily  in  rural  areas  and  to  keep  the  urban  working  classes  out  of  the 
army  in  order  to  maintain  a  cultural  distinction  between  soldiers  and 
potential  insurgents.  From  the  point  of  view  of  "military  education"  care  was 
explicitly  taken  to  separate  the  army  from  civil  society:  the  geographical 
mobility  of  units  was  extremely  high,  and  contacts  with  civil  society  were 
viewed  with  suspicious  eyes  and  could  seriously  harm  careers. 

In  terms  of  labour  relations,  the  outcome  of  this  pattern  was  twofold. 
On  the  one  hand,  the  army  increasingly  became  a  social  microcosm  with 
its  own  rules  and  separated  from  the  rest  of  society.  On  the  other  hand, 
solidarity  and  even  a  certain  sense  of  equality  developed  within  this 
closed  microcosm.  This  was  due  to  the  facts  that  a  majority  of  officers 

61  Serman,  Les  Officiersfrancais  dans  la  nation. 

62  The  following  relies  on  Girardet,  La  societe  mililitaire,  pp.  13-63. 


434 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


were  former  rank  and  file  and  that  even  those  who  came  from  bourgeois 
or  noble  backgrounds  had  somewhat  lost  their  former  social  status.  Dif- 
ferences in  rank  came  thus  foremost  down  to  duration  of  service  and  the 
progressive  incorporation  of  the  values  of  military  society.  In  this  sense, 
the  military  was  a  self-reproducing  system.  It  was,  however,  almost  utterly 
incapable  of  attracting  recruits  and  was  thus  in  need  of  forced  enlistments 
by  the  means  of  the  lottery-draft.  Another  aspect  needs  to  be  highlighted: 
it  was  during  the  nineteenth  century  that  a  certain  model  of  "officialdom" 
(fonctionnariat)  became  hegemonic  and  grew  into  one  important  aspect 
of  military  labour  relations.  In  terms  of  careers  the  soldier  was  a  model 
of  what  later  became  a  "civil  servant":  as  a  state  employee  ideally  he  did 
not  change  his  profession  during  his  lifetime,  and  his  relative  comfort  in 
retirement  was  guaranteed  by  a  state  pension.  Careers,  though  slow,  were 
stable  and  foreseeable;  payment,  though  barely  sufficient,  was  guaranteed. 

In  this  sense,  there  was  an  important  difference  between  the  French 
army  during  the  Revolution  and  the  Napoleonic  period  on  the  one  hand 
and  after  1815  on  the  other.  Revolutionary  soldiers  were  considered  to  be 
lacking  discipline  but  to  be  superior  to  the  military  of  the  ancien  regime 
in  terms  of  motivation.  They  embodied  indiscipline  and  the  animalistic 
force  of  the  rabble  but,  at  the  same  time,  also  a  heroic  sense  of  honour 
which  stemmed  from  their  quality  as  defenders  of  the  fatherland.  The  key 
concept  was  "enthusiasm":  revolutionary  soldiers  had  a  goal  to  identify  with, 
whereas  soldiers  of  the  ancien  regime  were  considered  to  be  indifferent 
about  the  outcome  of  the  fight.  Some  of  these  characteristics  continued 
to  exist  during  the  Napoleonic  period,  and  ego-documents  from  foreign 
soldiers  under  Napoleon  suggest  that  the  relations  between  officers  and 
rank  and  file  were  perceived  as  much  better  than  they  were  in  other  armies 
of  the  time.63  Moreover,  Napoleon  inherited  one  of  the  basic  features  of 
revolutionary  warfare,  which  is  the  logistical  principle  that  the  army  live 
off  the  countryside.64  In  many  cases  this  in  practice  meant  looting,  but  also 
the  possibility  for  the  soldiers  to  supplement  their  pay.  According  to  the 
cultural  imagination  of  the  time,  the  French  soldier  of  the  revolutionary  and 
Napoleonic  period  was  the  mirror  of  "the  people":  undisciplined,  violent, 
and  uncultured,  but  also  passionate,  even  enthusiastic,  and,  above  all,  of 
impressive  strength.  Rarely  wearing  proper  uniforms,  Napoleon's  armies 
were  viewed  by  his  adversaries  as  hordes  of  rabble,  and  by  his  followers  as 

63  Schehl,  Mit  der grofien  Armee  7872  von  Krefeld  nach  Moskau,  p.  35. 

64  See  Blanning,  The  French  Revolutionary  Wars,  7787-7802,  and  Lynn,  The  Bayonets  of  the 
Republic. 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


435 


the  emanation  of  the  heroic  strength  of  the  nation.  The  post-1815  army  was 
the  perfect  antithesis  of  this  image.  Pedantic  discipline,  subordination, 
patient  military  labour,  and  slow  careers  were  the  distinctive  features  of  the 
new  army  after  Napoleon.  The  Diary  of  Marshall  Boniface  de  Castellane  is 
perhaps  the  most  explicit  source  for  this  return  to  an  older  "military  spirit": 
"a  soldier  should  not  even  think  about  the  possibility  to  act  otherwise  than 
he  is  ordered  to".65 

The  European  revolutions  of  1848  were  an  essential  turning  point  with 
regard  to  the  cultural  representation  of  soldiers  in  France.  Around  1848 
the  military  was  progressively  assimilated  to  the  maintainance  of  social 
order,  rather  than  with  revolutionary  uprising.  This  is  obviously  linked 
to  the  role  of  the  military  in  crushing  insurrections  and  revolts  all  over 
Europe.  A  complete  reversal  of  the  cultural  and  political  significance  of  the 
military  was  the  result  of  this.  The  military  became  progressively  part  of  the 
defence  of  social  order,  of  civilization,  and  of  religion,  and  the  miseries  of 
military  life  were  now  glorified  as  the  necessary  renouncement  of  worldly 
pleasures.  The  military,  in  short,  was  depicted  as  disciplined,  invigorated, 
and  healthy,  and  was  thus  the  perfect  antithesis  of  the  corrupt  urban  and 
working-class  life: 

Ce  qu'il  y  a  de  plus  grand,  de  plus  beau,  de  plus  digne  d'admiration 
dans  nos  societes  modernes,  c'est  certainement  le  paysan  transforme 
par  la  loi  en  soldat  d'infanterie.  Pauvre,  il  protege  la  richesse;  ignorant, 
il  protege  la  science.  [...]  Ce  soldat  est  l'expression  la  plus  complete,  la 
plus  noble,  la  plus  pure  de  la  civilisation  creee  par  le  christianisme,  car 
il  met  en  pratique  la  pensee  chretienne:  le  sacrifice.66 

This  renewed  image  of  the  military  came  to  a  peak  under  Napoleon  III. 
Attempts  were  made  under  the  Second  Empire  to  get  closer  to  a  "real" 
conscription,  as  had  been  realized,  according  to  many  French  observers, 
in  Prussia.  Napoleon  III  actually  adhered  very  closely  to  the  Prussian  re- 
cruitment system.  In  a  series  of  articles  he  had  written  for  the  newspaper 
Progres  du  Pas- de- Calais  in  1843  _  thus  before  coming  to  power  -  he  had 
called  for  the  abolition  of  substitution  and  the  organization  of  a  strong 
military  reserve.  According  to  him,  "the  Prussian  organization  is  the  only 
one  which  is  adapted  for  our  democratic  nature,  for  our  egalitarian  habits". 
In  Prussia,  Louis-Napoleon  Bonaparte  went  on,  the  whole  nation  was  armed 

65  Cited  by  Girardet,  La  societe  militaire,  p.  75. 

66  Ibid.,  p.  31. 


436 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


for  defence,  whereas  in  France  "only  the  bourgeoisie  is  armed  for  the  defence 
of  private  interests".67  When  he  became  emperor  his  rhetoric  became  less 
democratic,  but  he  still  admired  the  Prussian  way  of  identifying  the  citizen 
and  the  soldier.  What  was  even  more  important,  however,  was  the  fact  that 
the  Prussian  system  promised  a  decisive  increase  in  numbers  in  the  French 
army,  especially  by  the  means  of  the  formation  of  a  strong  reserve  which 
could  be  incorporated  in  times  of  war.  The  project  of  the  new  conscription 
law  was  published  by  the  emperor  himself  in  a  notice  that  appeared  in  Le 
moniteur  universel  on  12  December  1866.  However,  Napoleon's  nephew  faced 
serious  resistance,  both  from  the  officers  for  whom  the  "quality"  of  "military 
spirit"  -  which  needed  long  years  of  military  education  to  be  acquired  -  mat- 
tered more  than  the  quantity  of  conscripts.  The  attitude  of  the  republican 
party  towards  conscription  was  ambiguous:  on  the  one  hand,  they  strongly 
approved  of  the  idea  of  a  universal  military  service;  on  the  other,  they  were 
against  the  regime,  and  the  law  was  not  radical  enough  in  their  view.68  In 
this  political  situation,  the  emperor  did  not  succeed  in  imposing  his  will: 
the  law  of  4  February  1868  was  significantly  modified  by  the  Corps  Legislatif, 
and  its  main  achievement  was  to  forbid  private  contracts  of  substitution  in 
favour  of  a  procedure  of  replacement  according  to  which,  instead  of  hiring 
a  substitute,  the  wealthy  could  directly  buy  themselves  out.69 


The  Third  Republic 

The  period  following  the  French  defeat  in  1870-1871  was  characterized 
by  what  French  historiography  has  termed  the  "German  crisis  in  French 
thought".70  The  defeat  was  attributed  to  a  feeling  of  lack  of  attachment  on 
the  part  of  individuals  to  the  fate  of  the  nation  and  the  state,  and  relief  was 
sought  by  a  partial  adaptation  of  German  models.  This  concerned,  most 
importantly  but  not  exclusively,  the  patterns  of  military  recruitment. 

The  new  recruitment  law,  issued  on  27  July  1872,  was  a  compromise 
between  quite  different,  and  indeed  even  antagonistic,  political  expecta- 
tions. Professional  soldiers  highlighted,  on  the  one  hand,  the  need  to  instil 
a  "military  spirit"  which  necessitated  long  years  of  habits  of  subordina- 
tion and  obedience,  and  on  the  other,  the  need  to  train  a  large  number  of 


67  Napoleon  III,  Projet  de  loi  sur  le  recrutement  de  I'armee,  p.  23. 

68  See  Casevitz,  Une  loi  manquee. 

69  See  Schnapper,  Le  remplacement  militaire  en  France. 

70  Digeon,  La  crise  allemande  de  la  penseefrancaise. 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


437 


conscripts  to  be  incorporated  in  time  of  war.  However,  the  most  important 
change  concerned  the  attitude  of  the  political  right  towards  compulsory 
military  service.  Conservatives  invoked  the  role  of  the  military  in  1848 
and,  more  recently,  during  the  Paris  Commune  of  1871,  when  the  army 
had  saved  "civilization":  "nous  nous  demandons  si  ce  n'est  pas  la  l'ecole  oil 
il  faut  envoyer  ceux  qui  paraissent  l'avoir  oublie,  apprendre  comment  on 
sert  et  comment  on  aime  son  pays.  Que  tous  nos  enfants  y  aillent  done  et 
que  le  service  obligatoire  soit  la  grande  ecole  des  generations  futures."71 
On  the  political  left,  compulsory  military  service  was  traditionally  linked 
to  the  republican  heritage.  If  the  army  had  been  instrumental  in  crushing 
uprisings  and  revolutions,  this  was  due,  according  to  the  republicans,  to  the 
fact  that  the  army  was  not  recruited  through  universal  conscription  and 
that  it  had  been  maintained  at  a  distance  from  civil  society. 

In  1872,  the  lottery  system  was  maintained  and  those  with  "bad  numbers" 
were  obliged  to  serve  five  years  on  active  service,  and  another  four  years 
in  the  reserve,  whereas  those  holding  "good  numbers"  received  a  basic 
military  training  of  only  a  year.  The  goal  was  to  provide  military  training 
for  every  male,  and  a  proper  military  education  -  the  development  of  the 
specifically  military  virtues  -  for  a  minority.  This  law,  however,  was  inspired 
by  the  idea  of  the  obligation  of  personal  and  universal  service.  Beyond  the 
military  necessity  of  this  form  of  recruitment,  the  topic  of  the  educational 
function  of  military  service  was  stressed  very  much  to  justify  universal 
military  service.  Military  service  as  an  educational  project  was  actually  a 
programme  that  had  been  developed  since  the  Restoration.  According  to 
Captain  Louis  Pagezy  de  Bourdeliac,  time  under  the  colours  could  most 
usefully  be  spend  by  providing  an  intellectual  and  moral  education  for  the 
soldiers:  reading  and  writing,  but  also  patriotism,  honesty,  and  a  cult  of 
honour  should  be  on  the  military  agenda.72  Towards  the  end  of  the  Second 
Empire,  General  Louis-Jules  Trochu  had  argued  for  a  military  service  of 
short  duration:  this  kind  of  conscription  has  "le  triple  effet  de  donner  du 
ressort  a  l'armee,  de  moraliser  la  population,  de  faire  penetrer  les  habitudes 
et  l'esprit  militaires  dans  le  corps  social  tout  entier".73  If  this  kind  of  thinking 
was  marginal  before  1870,  it  became  hegemonic  after  the  Franco-Prussian 
War  and  it  obviously  affected  labour  relations  within  the  military. 


71  Cited  by  Girard,  La  societe  militaire,  p.  122. 

72  Pagezy  de  Bourdeliac,  De  I'emploi  des  loisirs  du  soldatfrangais  en  temps  de  paix,  and  Anony- 
mous, Essai  sur  I'etat  militaire  en  7825. 

73  Trochu,  L'armee francaise  en  7867,  p.  278. 


438 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


The  growing  influence  of  republican  positions  in  French  political  life 
after  1871  could  not  but  have  an  impact  on  the  subsequent  legislation,  and 
the  1889  law  may  be  considered  an  institutionalization  of  the  republican 
conception  of  military  service  and  of  the  relationship  between  the  indi- 
vidual and  the  state.  It  also  remains  true,  however,  that  a  genuinely  equal 
obligation  of  the  individual  to  the  state  never  existed,  not  even  after  the  1905 
legislation,  which  revoked  the  exceptions  granted  to  certain  categories,  such 
as  priests,  thus  establishing  a  theoretical  equality  of  service.  In  practice, 
however,  the  well-educated  sons  of  the  bourgeoisie  still  benefited  from 
certain  advantages  in  terms  of  employment,  career  prospects,  and  even 
the  duration  of  actual  service.  France  adopted  the  Prussian  model  of  the 
"one-year  volunteers"  (Einjahrig-Freiwillige)  which  permitted  the  educated 
classes  to  be  discharged  after  a  single  year  of  service  and  to  be  promoted 
as  officers  in  the  reserve.74  Later  on,  holders  of  university  degrees  could 
be  employed  entirely  in  civilian  duties  while  being  in  theory  members  of 
the  army. 

On  the  social  level,  the  changing  pattern  of  recruitment  had  enormous 
consequences.  First  of  all,  there  is  a  tendency  towards  the  "gentrification" 
of  the  military  profession.  This  movement  started  under  the  Second  Empire 
but  accelerated  with  the  advent  of  the  Third  Republic.  The  proportion  of 
those  who  were  made  officers  after  having  attended  military  colleges  rose 
significantly  in  contrast  to  the  promotion  of  non-commissioned  officers 
and  thus  the  former  rank  and  file.  The  social  origin  of  those  alumni  of 
military  colleges  was  predominantly  the  mid-level  bourgeoisie,  but  there 
are  also,  along  with  sons  of  the  petty  bourgeoisie  and  of  low-ranking  civil 
servants,  young  men  of  noble  descent  and  those  stemming  from  the  higher 
bourgeoisie.  Moreover,  the  only  way  for  non-commissioned  officers  to  be- 
come officers  was  to  be  admitted  to  a  staff  college.  These  measures  were 
intended  to  raise  the  level  of  education  of  military  personnel,  but  they  had 
also  the  side  effect  of  considerably  altering  the  social  composition  of  the 
army.  Among  the  professional  cadres  two  distinct  classes  emerge:  on  the 
one  hand  the  high-ranking  officers,  usually  from  higher  social  origins,  who 
rapidly  became  officers  after  graduating  from  military  colleges;  on  the  other 
hand,  non-commissioned  officers  and  low-ranking  officers,  usually  from 
lower  social  origins.  Military  hierarchies,  in  other  words,  now  mirrored 
the  hierarchies  in  civil  society  and  the  army  lost  its  role  as  a  mechanism 
of  upward  mobility. 

74  See  Frevert,  Die  kasernierte Nation,  esp.  "Biirgerliche  Arrangements:  Einjahrige  und  Reser- 
veoffiziere". 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


439 


Labour  relations  within  the  army  were  also  altered  by  the  educational 
role  of  the  military.  Before  the  Third  Republic  officers  and  the  rank  and 
file  largely  shared  a  common  background  of  social  origin  and  manners. 
From  the  last  third  of  the  nineteenth  century  onwards,  officers  and 
non-commissioned  officers  were  charged  with  morally  and  intellectually 
"improving"  the  recruits.  The  latter  were  no  longer  part  of  the  same  "family", 
since  their  presence  under  the  colours  was  of  limited  duration.  The  more 
egalitarian  recruitment  of  universal  conscription  thus  had  the  paradoxical 
consequence  that  social  relations  within  the  army  became  less  egalitarian 
on  all  levels.  During  the  first  years  of  the  republic,  religious  instruction  was  a 
pivotal  part  of  the  moralizing  mission.  Moreover,  the  army  was  charged  with 
eradicating  bad  behaviour  such  as  alcoholism  -  only,  however,  among  the 
rank  and  file  and  not  among  professional  cadres.75  The  army  being  charged 
with  delivering  basic  instruction  to  all  recruits,  the  social  inequalities 
became  even  more  accentuated.  Upon  arrival,  the  recruits  had  to  pass 
exams  in  reading,  writing,  and  basic  mathematics.  The  results  of  these 
exams  were  important  in  the  future  differentiation  of  labour  within  the 
military.  The  fact  that  those  who  held  degrees  could  be  discharged  after  a 
shorter  period  of  actual  service  created  a  somewhat  paradoxical  situation: 
in  contrast  to  those  who  benefited  from  a  shorter  term  of  service,  very 
few  among  the  regular  conscripts  fulfilled  the  necessary  conditions  and 
had  the  requisite  skills  to  be  promoted  to  the  rank  of  non-commissioned 
officer.  The  non-commissioned  officers'  proverbial  stupidity  was  a  result 
of  this  situation.  However,  the  social  hierarchies  were  also  perceptible  on 
other  levels.  There  is  some  evidence  that  recruits  from  higher  social  origins 
were  less  subject  to  the  physical  violence  which  was  often  part  of  the  rites 
of  passage  in  the  army.76 

Variables  and  taxonomies 

This  short  overview  of  the  evolution  of  recruitment  policies  leads  to  the 
striking  conclusion  that  the  evolution  of  military  recruitment  over  the  "very 
long  nineteenth  century"  should  above  all  be  read  in  terms  of  different 
approaches  to  state  construction  and  nation-building  and  that  the  changes 
from  one  pattern  of  recruitment  to  others  were  but  consequences  of  the 
overall  political  and  cultural  processes.  There  was  a  slow  shift  away  from  a 

75  Roynette,  "Boris  pour  le  Service",  pp.  93-106. 

76  Ibid.,  p.  269. 


440 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


military  obligation  in  the  name  of  the  community  towards  its  encoding  as 
an  obligation  to  the  nation-state,  that  is,  military  duties  as  a  civic  obligation. 
This  shift  in  scale  was  accompanied  by  a  change  in  meaning  of  the  military 
obligation  in  general  and  of  conscription  in  particular.  In  this  sense,  the  four 
basic  variables  of  the  general  taxonomy  of  the  project  (payment,  duration, 
legal  constraints,  and  cultural  factors)  were  constantly  under  debate  during 
the  period. 

The  general  outcome  of  the  evolution  of  French  recruitment  practices 
from  the  late  eighteenth  until  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  is  the 
declining  importance  of  payment.  Traditionally  soldiers  received  a  quite 
significant  amount  of  money  when  signing  the  recruitment  contract  (prime 
d'engagement).  Once  they  were  soldiers,  their  normal  pay  was  notoriously 
too  low  to  enable  them  to  live  a  decent  life.  Originally,  the  "proprietor"  of 
the  regiment  had  to  pay  this  money  but,  as  pointed  out  earlier,  there  was  a 
tendency  in  the  eighteenth-century  militia  system  to  transform  this  into 
a  pecuniary  contribution  by  the  recruit's  home  community.  This  means 
on  the  one  hand  that  military  obligations  were  conceived  of  as  the  local 
community's  duty;  on  the  other  hand,  this  practice  implied  that  the  pat- 
terns of  manning  both  the  militia  and  the  regular  army  became  those  of  a 
"professional"  army,  which  implies  military  service  for  payment.  There  is, 
however,  a  double  difficulty.  The  first  difficulty  lies  in  the  fact  that  staffing 
was  both  "professional"  and  a  communal  duty,  inasmuch  as  each  parish 
had  to  furnish  a  certain  number  of  recruits.  The  second  difficulty  lies  in 
the  fact  that  the  prime  d'engagement  was  given  only  once  and,  by  accepting 
this  money,  the  future  soldier  had,  so  to  speak,  "sold  himself". 

Enlightenment  critics  thus  denounced  "military  slavery"  and  called 
for  a  system  in  which  citizens  "freely"  defended  their  fatherland.  This 
debate  continued  for  virtually  the  whole  nineteenth  century.  Against  the 
government's  argument  that  it  was  impossible  to  find  enough  volunteers, 
the  adversaries  of  conscription  regularly  replied  that  this  was  mainly  due 
to  the  authorities'  unwillingness  to  grant  primes  d'engagement  that  were 
substantial  enough  to  attract  people  to  the  army.  Conscription,  in  this  sense, 
was  clearly  a  means  of  saving  public  money. 

During  the  French  Revolution  and  the  Napoleonic  period,  payment 
does  not  seem  to  have  played  a  predominant  role  in  enlistment.  The  older 
practices  of  communities  collecting  money  for  their  recruits  continued 
to  exist  for  a  while;  however,  this  served  more  as  compensation  for  the 
financial  losses  that  the  soldier  would  face  compared  to  what  he  could  have 
earned  in  other  employment.  However,  the  government's  unwillingness  to 
provide  adequate  funding  was  partly  compensated  for  by  an  ideological 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


441 


justification  of  the  extended  military  obligations.  As  pointed  out,  the  poor 
payment  was  probably  the  main  reason  why  the  restored  monarchy  decided 
to  re-establish  a  selective  draft  on  the  basis  of  a  lottery  system  in  1818. 
In  any  event,  during  the  whole  period,  payment  was  never  sufficient  to 
attract  the  necessary  number  of  recruits.  On  the  contrary,  there  is  a  very 
clear  trend  towards  a  delegitimization  of  military  labour  for  payment. 
Apart  from  the  financial  aspect  of  the  matter,  payment  was  considered  as 
intrinsically  immoral.  The  only  morally  legitimate  motivation  for  fighting 
was  the  attachment  to  the  nation  and  the  fatherland. 

The  question  of  the  duration  of  service  is  handled  quite  differently  in 
periods  of  war  and  in  periods  of  peace.  The  French  Revolution  and  the  Na- 
poleonic Empire  were  characterized  by  nearly  permanent  war,  and  soldiers 
were  not  normally  released  during  wartime.  This  meant  that  desertion 
was  the  only  way  to  quit  the  service,  and  the  desertion  rate  was  actually 
extremely  high.77  In  reality,  the  legal  duration  of  service  thus  became  an 
issue  only  with  the  Restoration,  and  the  early  nineteenth  century  saw  a 
return  to  the  pre-revolutionary  practices,  that  is,  a  long  term  of  service  of  six 
to  eight  years.  In  both  cases,  the  debate  essentially  focused  on  the  question 
of  "military  spirit".  Professional  officers  and  conservatives  argued  that  long 
years  of  service  -  and  ideally  enlistment  at  a  very  young  age  -  were  needed 
to  instil  a  "cult  of  subordination"  and  military  discipline.  Republicans, 
on  the  other  hand,  argued  that  the  necessary  military  training  could  be 
achieved  in  a  very  short  time.  The  example  of  the  armies  of  the  French 
Revolution  has  proven  that  a  quite  effective  military  could  be  trained  very 
quickly.  It  was  not  the  technical  skills  that  took  time  to  develop  but  rather 
the  personal  dispositions  of  a  disciplined  soldier  who  was  used  to  obeying. 
Revolutionaries  and  republicans  were  opposed  to  a  long  term  of  service, 
precisely  because  they  contested  the  necessity  of  a  "military  spirit".  On  the 
contrary,  what  was  needed,  according  to  them,  was  a  "civic  spirit"  which 
included  a  sense  of  military  duty,  but  which  was  not  opposed  to  the  values 
of  civil  society.  It  was  thus  necessary  to  ensure  a  high  turnover  of  personnel 
and  thus  to  limit  the  time  of  service  to  a  strict  minimum.  In  the  words  of 
French  republicanism,  this  was  a  "national  army",  i.e.  an  army  that  was 
an  emanation  of  the  nation,  i.e.  of  civil  society.  However,  a  limited  term 
of  service  led  to  some  paradoxes  of  the  cadre/conscript  system  in  which 
professional  soldiers  with  lifelong  military  careers  commanded  short-term 
recruits  and  in  which  the  military  culture  was  essentially  defined  by  profes- 


77   See  Forrest,  Conscripts  and  Deserters. 


442 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


sionals.  In  short,  conscription  led  to  the  militarization  of  society  rather  than 
to  the  socialization  of  the  military. 

As  to  legal  constraints,  they  seem  to  be  subordinated  to  financial  con- 
siderations, to  social  change,  or,  more  importantly,  to  changes  in  political 
culture.  The  most  important  feature  in  this  respect  seems  to  be  the  changing 
understanding  of  nation  and  nationality.  Matters  of  ethnicity  were  for  the 
most  part  debated  as  matters  of  nationality,  and  we  need  to  pay  attention 
to  the  shifting  meaning  of  the  term  "nation"  during  these  years.  During 
the  eighteenth  century,  the  term  could  be  employed  in  the  sense  of  "civil 
society"  or  even  as  a  synonym  for  the  third  estate,  as  in  Abbe  Sieyes's  famous 
1789  pamphlet  Que'est-ce  que  tiers-etat?The  answer  to  this  question  is  well 
known:  the  third  estate  is  of  right  the  "nation",  and  this  latter  is  defined  as 
the  part  of  the  population  that  does  useful  work  and  that  produces  wealth. 
In  contrast  to  many  other  European  languages,  the  English  language  has 
kept  this  meaning.  Famous  examples  are  Adam  Smith's  The  Wealth  of  Na- 
tions, in  which  "nation"  designs  something  that  we  would  probably  term 
"society"  today.  In  Disraeli's  Sybil  or  the  Two  Nations,  or  in  the  "One-Nation 
Tory"  movement  during  the  1980s,  the  "nation"  designates  one  part  of  the 
population  within  a  given  territory,  and  indeed  within  a  constituted  nation- 
state.  The  French  language  lost  these  meanings  almost  completely  during 
the  nineteenth  century.  During  the  Revolution,  however,  concepts  such 
as  the  nation  and  la  patrie  (and  similar  notions  like  patriot,  patriotic,  etc.) 
had  a  clear  social  and  political  background,  rather  than  a  "nationalistic" 
understanding  in  the  modern  sense. 

A  clear  illustration  of  this  can  be  found  in  the  military  realm:  foreign 
corps  -  and  most  famously  the  Swiss  -  were  assimilated  to  "satellites  of 
despotism",  i.e.  to  adversaries  of  the  cause  of  the  nation  in  both  senses  of  the 
term.  Foreign  units  were  foreign  to  the  nation  in  the  sense  that  they  were 
not  a  part  of  the  revolutionary  community,  and  also  in  the  sense  that  they 
did  not  belong  to  the  French  community  of  descent.  The  consequence  of 
this,  however,  was  not  the  disbanding  of  foreign  corps  but  an  institutional 
separation  between  units  of  French  nationals  and  of  foreigners.  The  same 
logic  was  employed  during  the  Napoleonic  campaigns,  when  France's  allies 
had  to  furnish  large  contingents  of  the  Grande  Armee,  and  with  the  founding 
of  the  Foreign  Legion  in  1831.  The  tension  remained  palpable,  and  the  nation, 
however  undefined,  became  the  ultimate  source  of  legitimacy.  In  the  case 
of  the  foreign  units  in  Napoleon's  army,  it  can  be  argued  that  their  presence 
underpinned  an  ideological  orientation  of  the  First  Empire,  that  is,  the  idea 
of  a  European  federation  under  French  leadership.  In  the  case  of  the  Foreign 
Legion  it  is  certainly  not  by  coincidence  that  the  reward  for  long  years  of 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


443 


service  for  France  consisted  of  the  naturalization  of  the  legionnaires,  that 
is,  to  their  becoming  French  nationals. 

The  most  important  issue,  however,  is  certainly  the  renegotiation  of 
the  meaning  of  Liberte.  The  French  language  does  not  distinguish  between 
freedom  and  liberty,  and  both  issues  were  discussed  under  the  term  of 
Liberte.  Liberte  has  indeed  become  a  Grundbegriffin  the  sense  of  Reinhart 
Koselleck's  conceptual  history,  that  is,  a  concept  that  all  parties  were  obliged 
to  use  in  order  to  defend  legitimate  social  claims.  But  the  meaning  of  the 
concept  was  constantly  under  debate.  Enlightenment  criticism  of  military 
obligation  regularly  used  the  term  "military  slavery"  to  denounce  militia 
obligations  or  peasant  conscription.  The  military  obligation  was  thus 
criticized  in  the  name  of  liberty. 

A  conceptual  reversal  occurred  with  the  French  Revolution.  Regarding 
conscription,  it  was  striking  that  both  its  supporters  and  its  opponents 
underpinned  their  claims  with  references  to  liberty.  The  conceptual  quarrel 
is  clearly  displayed  by  the  words  of  the  Count  of  Liancourt  who  declared, 
during  the  1789  debate  on  conscription,  that  he  was  "astonished  to  see 
that  liberty  is  invoked  to  support  the  hardest  and  the  broadest  of  slavery", 
adding  that  "it  would  be  a  hundred  times  better  to  live  in  Constantinople  or 
in  Morocco  than  in  a  country  in  which  laws  of  this  kind  are  in  force".78  And 
indeed,  the  task  was  obviously  easier  for  the  adversaries  of  conscription, 
since  they  could  argue  that  liberty  implied  that  people  ought  not  to  be  forced 
into  the  military  against  their  will.  The  promoters  of  conscription  had  thus 
to  redefine  the  concept  according  to  their  needs:  they  held  that  liberty  was 
not  so  much  a  personal  as  a  political  matter,  closely  linked  to  the  existence 
of  the  "public  force";  that  is,  to  a  strong  state,  liberty  "is  a  chimera  if  the 
stronger  one  can  with  impunity  oppress  the  weaker  one".79  No  real  liberty 
was  conceivable  if  not  in  a  republic,  and  the  absence  of  state  power  equalled 
the  oppression  of  the  weaker  one  by  the  stronger  one  and  was  therefore 
understood  as  "slavery".  The  real  issue  was  thus  access  to  civic  rights,  and 
a  whole  republican  tradition  had  linked  civic  rights  to  military  obligations. 
Modern  conscription  is  unthinkable  without  this  ideological  link. 

The  debate  over  the  link  between  liberty,  freedom,  and  citizenship  on  the 
one  hand  and  military  obligations  on  the  other  went  on  under  the  Restora- 
tion. At  the  moment  when  the  1818  military  legislation  was  discussed,  this 
link  became  particularly  problematic.80  The  reason  for  this  was  that  it  was 

78  Liancourt,  Opinion  sur  le  mode  de  recrutement pour  I'armee,  p.  7. 

79  Dubois-Crance,  Discours sur  laforce publique,  p.  8. 

80  For  the  following,  see  Hippler,  "Conscription  in  the  French  Restoration". 


444 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


difficult  to  separate  the  meaning  of  these  concepts  from  their  revolutionary 
legacy.  The  defenders  of  limited  conscription  underpinned  their  claims 
with  a  reference  to  citizenship:  it  was  the  duty  of  each  citizen  to  defend 
their  polity.  Conservative  critics  made  use  of  the  same  arguments  as  in 
1789:  Bonald,  for  instance,  depicted  conscription  as  "a  law  that  confiscates 
my  personal  liberty  prior  to  any  misdemeanour".81  Liberals,  on  the  other 
hand,  made  use  of  the  reference  to  liberty  to  argue  for  the  possibility  for 
the  wealthy  to  buy  themselves  out  of  the  obligation.  Military  obligations, 
according  to  them,  were  comparable  to  financial  contributions,  that  is,  to 
paying  tax.  Each  one  should  thus  have  the  possibility  to  contribute  to  the 
safety  of  the  state  in  either  financial  terms  or  by  means  of  personal  service. 
This  parallel  between  taxes  and  military  service  was  quite  clearly  expressed 
in  the  popular  name  given  to  conscription:  L'impdtdu  sang,  blood  tax. 

On  the  other  hand,  this  possibility  to  buy  oneself  out  of  the  obligation 
was  denounced  by  both  conservatives  and  republicans  as  illegitimate 
commodification.  The  conservative  deputy  Cardonnel  thus  depicted  in 
1818  the  image  of  "the  French  youth  becoming  a  commodity  [...]  object 
of  a  humiliating  traffic  and  a  shameful  trading  and  sordid  interest  and 
infamous  cupidity  triumphing  over  all  feelings  and  over  all  laws  of  nature".82 
The  interplay  between  the  developing  capitalist  structures  of  the  economy 
and  the  possibility  of  replacement  led  to  insurance  companies  being  set 
up  against  the  risk  of  the  draft;  they  became  a  flourishing  business  dur- 
ing the  first  two-thirds  of  the  nineteenth  century.83  During  the  Second 
Empire,  "substitution"  superseded  "replacement",  the  difference  being  that 
the  buying-out  was  no  longer  a  private  transaction  since  drafted  soldiers 
could  pay  a  certain  amount  of  money  directly  to  the  state  in  order  to  be 
exempted.  The  main  argument  advanced  for  substitution  was  that  it  was  a 
more  "moral"  procedure  than  replacement.84  As  pointed  out  above,  financial 
aspects  were  dubious  perse,  and  they  were  even  more  so  if  they  took  place 
in  the  capitalistic  civil  society,  whereas  a  mediation  by  the  state  conferred 
some  legitimacy  on  the  buy-out.  The  reason  for  this  is  certainly  to  be  looked 
for  in  the  fact  that  the  state  is  as  such  the  sphere  of  the  common  interest, 
in  contrast  to  the  private  interests  that  confront  each  other  savagely  in  a 
market  economy. 


81  Bonald,  Opinion  de  M.  de  Bonald,  depute  de  I'Aveyron,  p.  4. 

82  Cardonnel,  Opinion  de  M.  le  president  de  Cardonnel,  depute  du  Tarn,  p.  10. 

83  See  Schnapper,  Le  remplacement  militaire  en  France. 

84  Auvray,  L'dge  des  casernes,  p.  91. 


THE  FRENCH  ARMY,  1789-1914 


445 


The  above  discussion  of  the  key  concepts  in  which  military  obligations 
were  historically  understood  and  thus  culturally  and  politically  constructed 
as  legitimate  obligations  made  clear  that  taxonomies  are  always  and  of 
necessity  a  fragile  endeavour.  Taxonomies  always  run  the  risk  of  an  ahistoric 
-  and  thus  in  the  last  instance  teleological  -  understanding  of  the  historical 
material.  The  only  way  to  escape  from  this  seems  to  be  to  historicize  the 
terms  of  the  taxonomy  itself.  The  above  discussion  of  the  uncertainties 
about  the  concept  of  liberie  is  part  of  this  endeavour  to  historicize  the  key 
concepts. 

As  to  the  catalysts  of  change,  it  appears  that  the  experience  of  revolu- 
tionary war  was  of  crucial  yet  only  temporary  importance.  Contemporary 
military  observers  were  surprised  or  shocked  by  the  "regressive"  nature  of 
the  tactics  of  armies  of  the  French  Revolution,  which  differed  from  the  very 
sophisticated  tactics  of  traditional  eighteenth-century  armies.  The  same 
holds  true  for  weaponry,  since  the  most  striking  fact  for  foreign  militaries 
was  that  the  French  used  the  long-superseded  pike.  The  basic  lesson  that 
foreign  observers  learnt  from  this  experience  was  that  the  motivation  of 
the  soldiers  was  of  crucial  importance  for  military  success.  As  a  first  step, 
this  lesson  was  conceptualized  in  terms  of  "enthusiasm"  and  in  a  second 
step  in  terms  of  the  legitimizing  force  of  nationalisms. 

In  this  respect,  the  most  important  operator  of  change  is  certainly  to  be 
found  in  the  realm  of  political  representations  and  ideologies,  that  is,  in  the 
now  overwhelming  importance  of  the  nation  as  a  source  of  legitimacy.  And 
the  uncertainties  in  terms  of  military  recruitment  that  are  characteristic  for 
important  periods  of  nineteenth-century  French  history  can  without  too 
much  difficulty  be  linked  to  the  uncertain  nature  of  the  post-revolutionary 
nation. 

Perhaps  the  most  important  outcome  of  the  French  Revolution  in  terms 
of  military  policy  was  the  defeudalization  of  the  French  army.  Backed  by 
republican  ideology  and  by  social  turnover  in  the  positions  of  command  in 
the  army,  the  state  succeeded  in  establishing  its  supremacy  on  a  permanent 
basis.  It  was  only  under  the  Third  Republic  that  nobles  sought  military 
employment  en  masse,  however,  not  without  submitting  to  republican, 
and  thus  ultimately  bourgeois,  modes  of  selection.  Economic  and  financial 
factors  played  a  paradoxical  role.  As  pointed  out  above,  financial  considera- 
tions were  certainly  one  of  the  main  motivations  for  the  restored  monarchy 
not  to  reintroduce  the  form  of  military  recruitment  that  its  ideologists 
considered  fit  for  a  constitutional  monarchy,  that  is,  a  strictly  voluntary 
recruitment.  On  the  other  hand,  in  many  cases  financial  considerations 
also  prevented  conscription  from  becoming  truly  universal,  for  the  simple 


446 


THOMAS  HIPPLER 


reason  that  the  overall  strength  of  the  army  was  subordinated  to  financial 
constraints  and  not  to  the  amount  of  the  potentially  available  manpower. 

The  most  general  conclusion  about  French  recruitment  policies  concerns, 
without  any  doubt,  the  ideological  link  that  was  established  between  mili- 
tary obligations  and  citizenship.  However,  the  theoretical  principle  that 
each  citizen  ought  to  be  a  defender  of  the  fatherland  was  never  universally 
applied,  not  even  during  the  French  Revolution  or  under  the  Third  Republic. 
One  had  always  to  cope  with  financial  constraints  on  the  one  hand,  and 
with  social  acceptance  -  especially  by  the  upper  classes  -  on  the  other.  This 
is  why  the  boundary  between  conscripted  soldiers  and  pressed  soldiers  is 
sometimes  difficult  to  draw.  This  point  becomes  particularly  visible  under 
the  constitutional  monarchies  and  the  Second  Empire,  when  only  a  very 
small  proportion  of  the  potential  conscripts  were  actually  enlisted. 


The  Dutch  army  in  transition 

From  all-volunteer  force  to  cadre-militia  army,  1795-1830 
Herman  Amersfoort 

In  1748,  the  last  year  of  the  War  of  the  Austrian  Succession  (1740-1748), 
the  army  of  the  United  Provinces  had  a  strength  on  paper  of  126,000  men, 
the  actual  strength  being  approximately  90,000.'  This  was  an  impressive 
number  and  by  and  large  the  equivalent  of  the  complement  during  the  War 
of  the  Spanish  Succession  (1701-1714). 2  Over  the  peacetime  years  after  1748 
numbers  declined  to  just  over  40,000.  This  still  constituted  a  considerable 
force.  As  a  rule  of  a  thumb  eighteenth-century  political-military  leadership 
considered  an  army  equivalent  to  1  or  1.5  per  cent  of  the  population  accept- 
able to  secure  the  safety  of  the  state  in  time  of  peace.  Given  a  population 
of  1.9  million  inhabitants  around  1750  the  United  Provinces  mobilized  an 
army  of  2.1  per  cent  of  the  population.  However,  the  actual  strength  of  the 
army  of  the  Batavian  Republic  (1795-1806)  and  the  Kingdom  of  Holland 
(1806-1810)  sank  to  numbers  ranging  from  only  22,000  men  to  37,000.  This 
is  remarkable  taking  into  account  that  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth 
century  saw  a  slow  growth  of  the  population,  reaching  a  total  of  just  over  2 
million  inhabitants  in  1795  and  considering  that  during  those  years  Holland 
was  fully  engaged  in  the  war  effort  of  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic  France.3 
These  decreasing  numbers  reflect  the  persisting  financial  exhaustion  of 
the  United  Provinces  after  the  War  of  the  Austrian  Succession.  From  1810 
onwards  things  were  hardly  any  better.  During  the  period  of  the  annexation 
of  Holland  to  the  French  Empire  (1810-1813)  in  all  an  estimated  35,000  Dutch 
military  served  under  Bonaparte's  colours.4 

The  shift  came  after  the  restoration  of  Dutch  independence  in  November 
1813.  As  from  January  1814  the  peacetime  establishment  of  the  army  of  the 
newly  founded  kingdom  of  William  I  called  for  a  total  of  52,000  men.  On 
this  basis,  after  a  five-year  period  a  wartime  strength  of  145,000  would  have 
been  within  grasp.5  For  the  first  time  since  1748  the  Dutch  army  on  a  war 

1  Van  Nimwegen,  De  Republiek  der  Verenigde  Nederlanden  als  grote  mogendheid,  p.  103. 

2  Van  Nimwegen,  "Deser  landen  crijchsvolck",  p.  421. 

3  Zwitzer,  "De  militie  van  de  staat",  pp.  175-178;  Gabriels,  "Tussen  Groot-Brittannie  en  Frankrijk", 
p.  160. 

4  Joor,  De  Adetaar  en  het  Lam,  pp.  340-342. 

5  Amersfoort,  Koning  en  Kanton,  pp.  62-90. 


448 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


footing  as  well  as  on  a  peace  footing  would  have  exceeded  the  figures  of  the 
days  of  the  old  republic,  when  the  country  was  considered  a  power  of  the 
first  rank  in  Europe.  These  145,000  soldiers,  however,  are  a  theoretical  figure 
since  the  system  of  army  formation  as  it  had  been  designed  in  January  1814 
was  superseded  by  new  legislation  the  next  year  and  since  the  demographic 
resources  were  dramatically  expanded  to  5.4  million  inhabitants  after 
the  union  of  the  Northern  and  Southern  Netherlands  in  June  1815.  But 
the  145,000  figure  unmistakeably  indicates  that  William  I's  army  was  of 
a  completely  different  nature  than  its  eighteenth-century  predecessor.6 

This  transformation  had  needed  only  the  twenty-five  years  between 
1795  and  1820  to  come  about.  The  most  sweeping  change  had  been  the 
introduction  of  military  conscription.  After  1820  the  army  of  King  William 
I  was  a  cadre-militia  army.  When  on  a  war  footing  some  three-quarters  of 
the  complement  consisted  of  conscripts  and  only  one-quarter  of  volunteers. 
The  army  of  the  United  Provinces,  the  State  Army  (Staatse  Leger),  had 
been  an  all-volunteer  force.  The  introduction  of  conscription  also  led  to  a 
totally  different  national  composition  of  the  army.  In  the  second  half  of  the 
eighteenth  century  some  50  per  cent  of  the  rank  and  file  of  the  State  Army 
was  made  up  of  soldiers  of  national  birth.7  The  Dutch  labour  market  simply 
could  not  sustain  a  higher  proportion  of  nationals.  Since  the  Eighty  Years' 
War  (1568-1648)  the  army  of  the  United  Provinces  had  recruited  in  Germany, 
Scotland,  Switzerland,  and  the  prince-bishopric  of  Liege.  However,  in  the 
second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century  these  recruiting  areas  gradually 
ran  dry.8  Due  to  booming  business  in  agriculture  and  industry  as  well  as 
restrictive  and  protective  governmental  measures  in  Prussia,  the  Austrian 
Netherlands,  and  Britain  the  captains  commanding  the  companies  of  the 
State  Army  met  increasing  difficulties  in  their  recruiting  efforts.  Moreover, 
the  bounties  and  soldiers'  pay  had  not  kept  pace  with  rising  wages.  The 
States-General  now  had  to  resort  to  so-called  seigneurial  recruitment.9 
They  contracted  with  petty  German  princes  for  ready-made  regiments 
recruited  by  these  princes  from  among  the  population  of  their  states. 

The  Royal  Army  of  William  I  from  1820  onwards  was  of  predominantly 
national  composition.  In  the  beginning  two  regiments  from  the  principality 
of  Nassau  and  four  regiments  from  the  Swiss  cantons  reinforced  the  army, 

6  Ibid.,  pp.  88-90,  97-105. 

7  Zwitzer,  "De  militie  van  de  staat",  pp.  39-61. 

8  Suter,  Inner-SchweizerischesMilitdrunternehmertum  im  iS.Jahrhundert;  Biihrer,  DerZiircher 
Solddienst  des  iS.Jahrhunderts. 

9  Zwitzer,  "De  militie  van  de  staat",  pp.  50-52, 184-187. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


449 


echoing  eighteenth-century  recruiting  practices.  However,  the  first  two 
returned  to  their  homeland  in  1815  and  1820  respectively,  and  the  Swiss 
regiments  were  disbanded  in  1829  since  they  no  longer  fitted  in  with  the  new 
army  with  its  militia-like  nature.  Had  these  foreign  regiments  been  at  full 
strength  in  1815,  which  incidentally  they  were  not,  some  25  per  cent  of  the 
rank  and  file  of  the  infantry,  the  mainstay  of  the  army,  would  have  consisted 
of  foreign  volunteers.10  What  this  figure  does  indicate  is  that  the  king  during 
the  first  years  of  his  reign  was  ready  to  accept  a  considerable  foreign  element 
in  his  army  and  that  this  element  was  rapidly  diminishing.  By  1820  the 
remaining  foreign  regiments  were  already  of  marginal  importance.  As  the 
army  had  lost  its  Swiss  regiments  in  1829,  its  foreign  element  was  reduced 
from  then  on  to  practically  nil. 

The  transition  from  the  eighteenth-century  all-volunteer  force  to  the 
early  nineteenth-century  cadre-militia  army  also  entailed  a  change  in 
the  foundations  of  the  military  power  of  the  state.  Until  1795  the  military 
power  of  the  United  Provinces,  like  most  other  states  of  the  ancien  regime, 
in  the  end  depended  upon  the  fiscal  efficiency  and  the  credit-worthiness 
of  the  state,  military  manpower  being  for  sale  on  the  national  as  well  as 
international  labour  market  and  war  being  too  expensive  to  be  exclusively 
financed  out  of  the  annual  revenues  of  the  state.  This  is  why  the  rich  and,  ac- 
cording to  contemporary  standards,  financially  and  fiscally  well-organized 
republic,  in  spite  of  its  very  limited  population,  could  afford  the  army  (and 
navy)  it  needed  to  play  a  key  role  in  all  anti-French  coalitions  from  the  War 
of  Devolution  (1667-1668)  up  to  the  War  of  the  Austrian  Succession.  And 
this  is  why  the  republic  could  no  longer  play  this  role  after  this  last  war 
had  exhausted  it  beyond  repair.  From  1814  onwards  the  military  power  of 
William  I's  kingdom  was  a  function  of  both  national  demography  and  the 
weight  of  the  conscription  burden  the  national  population  was  willing  to 
bear.  The  introduction  of  conscription  in  large  parts  of  Germany  and  the 
subsequent  introduction  of  restrictions  on  recruitment  by  foreign  powers 
brought  Dutch  recruitment  in  Germany  to  a  halt  after  1814.  The  two  regi- 
ments from  Nassau  in  fact  marked  the  end  of  seigneurial  recruitment.11 
Given  the  limitations  of  the  national  labour  market  the  army  increasingly 
had  to  rely  on  conscription  to  fill  its  complement,  thus  limiting  the  military 

10  Amersfoort,  Koning  en  Kanton,  pp.  65-66. 

11  Ibid.,  pp.  97-i05;Japikse,  De geschiedenis  van  hethuis  Oranje-Nassau,  II,  pp.  127-155;  de  Bas, 
Prins Frederik  der Nederlanden  en  zijn  tijd,  III-i,  pp.  i27f£,  409;  Wiippermann,  De  vorming  van  het 
Nederlandsche  legernade  omwenteling,  p.  4;  correspondence  in  National  Archives  [henceforth, 
NA]  of  the  Netherlands,  Archives  of  the  Algemene  Staatssecretarie  1813-1840  [henceforth,  ASS] 
no.  6564. 


450 


HERMAN  AMERSF00RT 


power  of  the  Dutch  kingdom  to  the  rather  modest  demographic  resources  of 
the  Netherlands.  Only  the  union  of  the  Northern  and  Southern  Netherlands 
(1815-1830)  masked  this  otherwise  inescapable  conclusion  for  the  time  being. 

Two  further  consequences  of  the  introduction  of  conscription  were 
that  one  of  the  plagues  of  the  Staatse  Leger  -  namely  the  ineradicable  gap 
between  the  strength  of  the  regiments  on  paper  and  the  actual  strength 
after  1820  -  under  normal  conditions  ceased  to  exist,  the  other  consequence 
being  that  in  times  of  crisis  the  army  could  be  brought  onto  its  war  foot- 
ing by  simply  calling  to  arms  the  reservists  and  integrating  them  in  the 
companies  of  the  existing  peacetime  regiments.  Conscription  freed  the 
wartime  army  as  well  as  the  peacetime  army  from  the  volatility  of  supply 
and  demand  on  the  labour  market,  the  conscript  serving  for  the  fixed  and 
low  pay  he  simply  had  to  accept  by  force  of  law. 

Another  important  change  was  that  the  Royal  Army  was  primarily 
a  military  instrument  of  the  state,  intended  to  provide  for  internal  and 
external  security.  During  the  reign  of  the  last  Stadtholder  Prince  William 
V  (1766-1795)  the  officers'  commissions  had  increasingly  been  granted  to 
members  of  the  aristocratic  governing  families  who  supported  the  House 
of  Orange.12  Because  of  the  Stadtholder's  intention  to  buttress  his  clientele, 
in  many  cases  political  loyalty  and  reliability  of  the  officer  corps  prevailed 
over  professional  attitude,  knowledge,  and  expertise.  By  doing  this  the  last 
Stadtholder  had  transformed  the  officer  corps  into  an  instrument  for  the 
maintenance  of  internal  political  stability.  It  is  true  that  King  William  I 
in  many  instances  treated  the  army  as  his  personal,  dynastic  instrument 
of  power,  managing  the  army  by  royal  decree  rather  than  legislation  as 
much  as  possible,  but  conditions  had  changed  since  1795.  The  kingdom 
was  a  constitutional  monarchy  governed  by  the  rule  of  law.  Article  59  of 
the  Constitution  of  1815  invested  the  king  with  supreme  authority  over 
the  armies  and  navies  of  the  state,  but  not  with  their  supreme  command. 
The  army  and  navy  now  belonged  to  an  abstract  entity  separated  from  the 
person  of  the  sovereign  and  his  court,  namely  the  government  and  the 
state,  embodied  in  the  Department  of  War  and  the  Department  of  the  Navy. 
Here  management  and  control  were  centralized  on  the  national  level  and 
lay  in  the  hands  of  professional  civil  servants:  the  administrative  legacy  of 
the  Kingdom  of  Holland  and  the  years  of  the  annexation  to  the  empire.  It 
was  only  natural  that  the  civil  service,  now  that  it  had  come  into  existence, 

12  Gabriels,  "Tussen  Groot-Brittannie  en  Frankrijk",  p.  153.  For  the  United  Provinces  as  a 
clientele  state  in  the  closing  decades  of  the  eighteenth  century,  see  Gabriels,  De  heren  als  dienaren 
en  de  dienaar  als  heer. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


451 


would  try  to  develop  policies  of  its  own  designed  to  serve  the  interests  of 
the  state;  such  policies  might  even  run  counter  to  the  interests  of  the  king.13 

A  further  contrast  between  the  army  of  the  United  Provinces  and  that  of 
the  kingdom  of  William  I,  and  related  to  the  previous  one,  was  the  changing 
political  control  over  the  army  The  Constitution  invested  the  king  with 
supreme  authority  over  the  armed  forces  and,  as  far  as  the  king  himself 
was  concerned,  he  considered  the  armed  forces  as  belonging  to  his  royal 
prerogative.  But  since  the  Constitution  introduced  the  separation  of  powers, 
the  king  shared  power  with  the  States-General,  even  with  respect  to  the 
army.  The  States-General  had  the  right  to  vote  the  state's  budget  and  the  leg- 
islation that  controlled  the  weight  of  the  conscription  burden.  Although  in 
both  matters  the  initiative  was  with  the  king,  the  States-General  possessed 
a  certain  countervailing  power.  The  Liberals  in  the  parliament  quickly 
learned  to  use  this  right  to  lay  the  royal  military  prerogative  under  siege. 

The  creation  of  the  modern  state  also  had  sweeping  consequences  for  the 
rank  and  file.  The  army  of  the  United  Provinces  had  been  a  typical  product 
of  the  ancien  regime.  The  companies,  squadrons,  and  regiments  were  owned 
by  the  captains  and  colonels  who  commanded  them.  They  exploited  their 
units  as  pieces  of  private  property  on  the  basis  of  the  commission  that  had 
been  granted  to  them  by  their  paymaster,  the  States-General.  The  rank  and 
file  swore  an  oath  of  allegiance  to  the  States-General,  but  otherwise  had  no 
direct  relationship  whatsoever  with  the  sovereign  they  served.  They  were 
recruited,  enlisted,  equipped,  armed,  and  paid  by  their  captain  and  had  to 
deal  only  with  him.  This  system  was  abolished  in  1795.  Private  ownership  of 
the  companies  and  regiments  ceased  to  exist.  The  task  of  recruitment  now 
devolved  upon  the  state.  Henceforth  the  soldiers  and  non-commissioned 
officers  (NCOs)  were  all  directly  enlisted  by  the  state  as  represented  by  the 
regiment  and  subsequently  distributed  over  the  companies.  The  activities 
this  entailed  were  carried  out  by  a  captain  appointed  specially  for  the 
purpose.  All  the  expenditure  this  involved  was  financed  out  of  the  corps' 
recruitment  fund,  which  was  itself  financed  centrally  by  the  Ministry  of 
Finance.  A  similar  arrangement  was  introduced  for  the  clothing,  equipment, 
and  armament  of  the  NCOs  and  soldiers.14  Now,  this  new  system  was  here  to 
stay.  It  survived  all  political  changes  of  the  1795-1813  period  and  was  adopted 
by  the  Royal  Army  in  1814  without  major  modifications. 

All  these  changes  in  the  military  domain  reflect  the  modernization  of 
state  and  society  that  is  so  characteristic  of  the  transition  from  the  ancien 

13  Amersfoort,  "De  strijd  om  het  leger  (1813-1840)". 

14  Hardenberg,  Overzigt  der  voornaamste  bepalingen,  I,  pp.  182-209. 


452 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


regime  of  the  closing  decades  of  the  eighteenth  century  to  the  centralized 
bureaucratic  national  state  and  modern  society  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
not  only  in  Holland  but  in  large  parts  of  the  Atlantic  world  as  well.  In  the 
Netherlands  the  foundations  of  the  nineteenth-century  cadre-militia  army 
were  laid  in  the  years  1795-1813. 

The  army  of  the  Batavian  Republic  and  the  Kingdom  of  Holland 

The  army  of  the  Batavian  Republic  was  an  all-volunteer  force,  like  the  army 
of  the  old  republic.  This  may  come  as  a  surprise  since  the  founding  fathers 
of  the  new  state  were  democrats  and  since  they  were  the  direct  heirs  of  the 
Patriot  movement.  This  political  opposition  movement  had  its  origins  in 
the  third  estate,  the  burghers,  and  had  fought  a  short  civil  war  (1786-1787)  to 
overthrow  the  regime  of  the  Stadtholder  and  the  aristocracy  that  supported 
him.15  Before  the  outbreak  of  hostilities  they  had  organized  themselves  into 
Free  Corps  and  'exercise  societies'  of  citizen  volunteers  and  had  effectively 
taken  control  in  a  number  of  towns  in  Holland,  Utrecht,  and  elsewhere. 
The  Stadtholder  had  hesitated  to  throw  his  army  against  them,  and  in  the 
end  it  was  the  intervention  of  the  Prussian  king  that  subdued  the  uprising, 
the  Patriot  armed  citizens  being  no  match  for  the  Prussian  professional 
regiments.16  The  most  radical  Patriots  and  their  families  (totalling  some 
40,000)  thereupon  fled  the  country  and  found  refuge  in  France  and  the 
Southern  Netherlands.  They  returned  to  their  fatherland  in  the  victorious 
French  army  that  conquered  the  United  Provinces  in  1795.  These  radicals 
gained  power  after  two  coups  d'etat  in  1798.  So  why  did  they  not  rebuild 
the  Batavian  army  out  of  a  mixture  of  professionals  from  the  old  army, 
volunteering  soldats-citoyens,  and  a  National  Guard  like  the  revolutionary 
French  Republic  had  done?  In  fact  they  tried,  but  failed. 

Already  in  1795  the  political  leadership  of  the  Batavian  Republic  had 
started  to  reorganize  the  army  and  had  discharged  all  Orangist  partisans 
in  the  army  to  assure  its  political  reliability.  The  new  army  was  to  be  an 
all-volunteer  force  with  a  strength  of  35,000  men.  However,  this  strength 
was  soon  reduced  as  it  entailed  too  heavy  a  financial  burden.  The  Batavian 
Republic  was  also  charged  with  all  expenses  for  the  25,000-strong  French 
Auxiliary  Corps  that  was  garrisoned  in  the  Netherlands.  Since  it  was  evident 

15  Schama,  Patriots  and  Liberators,  pp.  64-106;  Roegiers  and  Van  Sas,  "Revolutie  in  Noord  en 
Zuid";  van  der  Capellen,  Aan  hetvolk  van  Nederland,  pp.  10-13. 

16  Schama,  Patriots  and  Liberators,  pp.  107-132. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


453 


that  even  the  combined  Batavian  Army  and  French  Auxiliary  Corps  were 
not  strong  enough  to  defend  the  borders  and  man  the  garrisons  in  case  of  a 
two-front  war  against  Prussia  and  Britain,  the  Batavian  political  leadership 
planned  to  reinforce  the  army  with  a  National  Guard  of  volunteer  citizens. 
However,  enthusiasm  among  the  population  and  local  elites  proved  to 
be  low.  In  1786-1787  citizens  had  been  willing  to  join  the  Free  Corps  and 
local  militias  to  defend  their  political  ideals  in  an  internecine  struggle  for 
political  power.  After  1795  they  were  not  prepared  to  serve  in  a  National 
Guard  that  was  to  be  organized  into  regiments  and  trained  for  warfare 
against  the  professional  armies  of  foreign  powers.  So  the  initiative  for  a 
National  Guard  came  to  naught.  Reinforcing  the  professional  army  with 
units  of  armed  citizens  would  have  required  a  full-blown  conscription 
bill  that  made  armed  service  compulsory,  after  the  example  of  the  French 
Loijourdan-Delbrel  of  1798,  but  this  the  Batavian  leadership  apparently 
considered  a  bridge  too  far  at  the  time. 

After  the  demise  of  the  Batavian  Republic  in  1806  and  the  foundation  of 
the  Kingdom  of  Holland  under  Bonaparte's  younger  brother,  Louis  Napo- 
leon, the  potential  introduction  of  some  form  of  armed  service  reappeared 
on  the  scene.  Bonaparte  brought  heavy  pressure  to  bear  upon  his  brother 
to  follow  the  French  example  and  promulgate  a  Conscription  Act  in  order 
to  raise  the  numbers  he  needed  for  the  never  diminishing  war  effort  of  the 
empire,  but  Louis  Napoleon  wanted  to  avoid  this  at  all  cost.  He  clung  to  the 
existing  all-volunteer  force  and  hoped  to  satisfy  the  emperor  by  revitalizing 
the  National  Guard.17  All  towns  of  more  than  2,500  inhabitants  were  told 
to  establish  a  local  militia,  organized  into  companies  and  battalions,  in 
which  all  men  in  the  range  of  eighteen  to  fifty  years  old  would  have  to  be 
enrolled.  One-fifth  of  them  performed  active  service,  the  remainder  forming 
a  reserve.  Their  task  was  to  protect  against  unrest  and  to  perform  local  guard 
duties,  operational  command  lying  in  the  hands  of  the  local  authorities.  But 
from  the  very  start  they  were  also  expected  to  fulfil  full-time  garrison  duties 
in  the  event  that  the  regiments  left  for  the  mobile  field  army.  In  1809,  after 
the  outbreak  of  the  War  of  the  Fifth  Coalition,  service  for  the  National  Guard 
was  extended  to  all  inhabitants  irrespective  of  their  residence,  and  the  king 
proclaimed  himself  general  and  supreme  commander  of  the  National  Guard. 
Furthermore,  he  intended  to  transform  the  National  Guard  into  a  military 
force  by  organizing  it  into  regiments.  However,  when  this  plan  provoked 
serious  disturbances  among  the  population  he  drew  back,  with  the  result 
that  the  position  of  the  National  Guard  remained  rather  ambiguous.  On 


17   Joor,  De  Adelaar  en  het Lam,  pp.  283-298. 


454 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


the  one  hand,  they  were  part-time  local  militias,  tasked  with  local  policing 
duties  under  local  operational  command.  On  the  other  hand,  they  were 
supervised  by  the  Department  of  Home  Affairs,  stood  under  the  nominal 
command  of  the  king,  and  could  be  tasked  with  full-time  military  duties, 
even  outside  their  home  towns. 

However,  all  this  was  not  enough  to  save  the  Kingdom  of  Holland  as 
an  independent  ally  of  the  empire.  Bonaparte  wanted  more  troops  than 
Louis  Napoleon  was  able  to  muster.  In  July  1810  Louis  Napoleon  abdicated 
in  favour  of  his  son  and  Holland  was  annexed  to  the  French  Empire.  The 
army  was  immediately  reorganized  and  fully  integrated  in  the  French  force 
structure.18  French  conscription,  the  Loijourdan-Delbrel,  was  introduced 
to  fill  the  complement  of  the  Dutch  regiments  in  French  service,  and  the 
enlistment  of  volunteers  came  to  a  halt.  The  French  National  Guard  was 
introduced  in  the  Dutch  departments  which  meant  that  time  and  again 
units  of  the  National  Guard  were  transferred  to  the  army  and  incorporated 
in  the  Grande  Armee.  Over  the  years  1811-1813  some  35,000  Dutch  conscripts 
and  National  Guardsmen  served  in  the  French  army.  Many  of  them  died  or 
simply  vanished  somewhere  on  the  road  from  their  hometown  to  Moscow 
and  back. 

This  sad  conclusion  also  marks  a  turning  point  in  the  system  of  Dutch 
army  formation.  In  the  1786-1787  civil  war  the  Patriot  movement  had  dem- 
onstrated that  corps  of  citizens  volunteering  for  armed  service  embodied 
a  viable  alternative  for  professional  forces,  provided  that  their  political 
motivation  was  strong  enough.  For  them  soldiering  and  political  participa- 
tion as  citizens  were  just  two  sides  of  the  same  coin.  At  the  same  time  it  must 
be  admitted  that  the  sorry  fate  of  this  bottom-up  army  against  the  seasoned 
Prussian  regiments  also  proved  that  armed  citizens  could  supersede  the 
professional  army  only  if  they  were  organized,  led,  armed,  and  trained  as 
professional  soldiers.  This,  of  course,  was  a  sensitive  matter  and  encountered 
resistance.  Only  the  state  possessed  the  financial  and  organizational  means 
to  ensure  that  armed  citizens  would  be  a  match  for  professional  soldiers. 
Inevitably,  this  entailed  that  the  citizen's  right  to  bear  arms  in  this  bottom- 
up  army  remained  firmly  rooted  in  the  local  community  and  in  which  the 
citizen  served  under  the  command  of  officers  elected  among  the  local  elite, 

18  Ibid.,  pp.  317-342;  Geerts,  Samenwerking  en  Confrontatie,  pp.  115-191;  Sabron,  Geschiedenis 
vanhet  724Ste  Regiment  Infanterie  van  Linie,  Geschiedenis  van  het^ste  Regiment  Lichte  Infanterie; 
ten  Raa,  De  uniformen  van  de  Nederlandsche  Zee-  en  Landmacht  hier  te  lande  en  in  de  kolonien, 
I,  Tekst,  pp.  107-130;  Homan,  Nederland  in  de  Napoleontische  Tijd,  pp.  138-146;  Colenbrander, 
Intijving  en  Opstand,  pp.  8-9,  22-23,  46-51;  de  Moor  and  Vogel,  Duizend  miljoen  maat  vervtoekt 
land. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


455 


was  transformed  into  a  duty  laid  from  the  top  down  upon  him  by  the  state, 
especially  so  since  the  citizen's  political  rights  evaporated  as  time  wore 
on.  In  contrast  to  the  democratic  constitutional  nature  of  the  Batavian 
Republic,  the  Kingdom  of  Holland,  not  to  mention  the  French  Empire,  was 
an  authoritarian  non-democratic  monarchical  regime.  This  explains  why 
the  attempts  of  the  Batavian  leadership,  as  well  as  those  of  Louis  Napoleon, 
to  transfer  the  National  Guard  from  the  local  level  to  the  central  state  and  to 
the  army  provoked  serious  unrest  and  disturbances  among  the  population. 
In  France,  similar  doubts  had  been  swept  away  by  the  need  to  protect  the 
republic  and  the  revolution  when  they  faced  the  intervention  of  reactionary 
foreign  powers,  as  was  testified  by  the  famous  levee  en  masse  of  1793.  In  the 
following  years  the  strength  of  the  French  army  dropped  as  revolutionary 
fervour  faded  away.  It  needed  the  conscription  act  of  1798  to  pave  the  way 
for  the  mass  armies  Napoleon  needed  to  realize  his  political  ambitions. 
In  Holland  it  needed  the  annexation  to  the  French  Empire  to  break  the 
stalemate.  In  both  countries  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic  warfare  were 
the  driving  forces  behind  the  disappearance  of  the  professional  army  of  the 
ancien  regime  and  the  birth  of  cadre-militia  army  of  conscripts. 

These  developments  were  part  and  parcel  of  the  more  comprehensive 
process  of  the  modernization  of  state  and  society.  At  the  heart  of  this  process 
was  the  break-up  of  the  self-contained  local  community,  by  making  the 
common  man  and  woman  part  of  a  greater  entity,  namely  the  state  and 
its  ideological  counterpart,  the  nation.  In  the  Netherlands  the  Batavian 
Revolution  of  1795  abolished  the  estates  as  intermediate  powers  between  the 
individual  and  the  state  as  well  as  the  right  to  govern  as  the  attribute  or  even 
personal  property  of  a  restricted  circle  of  aristocratic  families.  The  1795-1813 
period  saw  the  transfer  of  political  power  to  an  abstract  impersonal  entity, 
the  centralized  bureaucratic  national  state.  This  transformed  the  subjects  of 
the  ancien  regime  into  the  citizens-in-the-making  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
At  least  legally  and  in  theory,  every  single  man  and  woman  now  had  an 
individual  direct  relationship  to  the  state.  It  is  a  well-established  fact  that 
the  introduction  of  conscription  played  a  major  role  in  the  construction  of 
the  nineteenth-century  nation  and  nation-state.  Conscription  tore  young 
men  away  from  their  families  and  local  community.  It  brought  them  in 
contact  with  brothers-in-arms  from  other  parts  of  the  country,  subjected 
them  to  the  formal  and  informal  rules  of  the  military  world,  and  tied  up 
their  personal  fates  with  the  interests  of  the  king  and  the  state.  It  goes 
without  saying  that  this  was  not  brought  about  overnight.  Moreover,  it  must 
be  admitted  that  such  conclusions  are  partly  products  of  hindsight:  the 
historian's  reconstruction  of  events  endows  them  with  a  meaning  for  the 


456 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


future  that  was  not  always  understood  or  even  desired  by  contemporaries 
at  the  time.  So  let  us  return  to  these  events  and  explore  the  driving  forces 
behind  the  Dutch  cadre-militia  army  and  conscription  that  emerged  from 
the  seven  eventful  years  between  1813  and  1820.  It  is  a  historical  paradox 
that  the  hated  French  conscription  in  fact  laid  the  foundations  for  this  army. 

Bouchenroder's  army 

When  in  November  1813  the  French  administration  and  the  French  army  left 
the  Netherlands  in  great  haste,  a  triumvirate  took  power  as  a  provisional 
government.  At  that  time  there  was  no  such  thing  as  a  Dutch  army.  Dutch 
conscripts  raised  for  Napoleon  were  scattered  all  over  western  Europe, 
incorporated  in  the  retreating  French  armies.  Meanwhile  the  rebuilding 
of  an  army  was  a  matter  of  urgency.  Although  most  of  the  French  garrison 
troops  had  retreated  to  France  to  avoid  being  cut  off,  a  number  of  them  had 
stayed  behind  and  continued  to  occupy  several  garrison  towns  across  the 
country,  constituting  a  threat  to  Dutch  independence.  At  the  same  time 
there  was  the  danger  that  -  should  the  tide  of  war  turn  -  French  troops 
left  behind  in  Germany  would  invade  the  Netherlands  to  occupy  the  coast 
against  Britain.  Finally,  the  war  against  Napoleon  had  not  yet  been  decided. 
A  Dutch  contribution  to  the  allied  war  effort  would  certainly  improve  the 
bargaining  position  of  the  new  state  vis-a-vis  the  allies  after  the  defeat  of 
the  French  emperor. 

The  triumvirate,  as  far  as  the  military  was  concerned,  now  did  two 
things.  In  the  first  place  it  began  stimulating  the  creation  of  local  militias 
comprising  volunteers  and  commanded  by  local  "men  with  military  ex- 
perience", that  is  to  say,  officers  from  the  former  Dutch  army  or  from  the 
town  militias.19  These  volunteer  forces  were  to  defend  their  town  if  the 
French  returned.  In  the  second  place  the  triumvirate  appointed  as  colonel 
Frederick  Baron  von  Bouchenroder  to  organize  these  local  volunteer  forces 
into  a  national  army,  fit  to  lay  siege  to  the  towns  still  in  French  hands  and 
ready  to  take  part  in  the  continuing  war  against  Napoleon.  Bouchenroder 
was  a  German  officer  from  Mannheim  who  had  served  in  the  army  of  the 


19  Staatsbladvan  hetkoninkrijk  der Nederlanden  (The  Hague:  Van  Stockum,  1813-present),  vol. 
1813-1874  [henceforth,  Staatsblad  with  year],  no.  1. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


457 


United  Provinces  and  who  was  a  close  friend  of  one  of  the  members  of  the 
triumvirate,  G.K.  van  Hogendorp.20 

The  army  Bouchenroder  came  up  with  had  a  complement  of  25,560  men 
and  6,462  horses.21  It  consisted  of  infantry,  cavalry,  and  artillery.  The  local 
militias  were  to  be  organized  and  trained  for  war  by  bringing  them  together 
in  companies,  battalions,  and  regiments  of  this  army.  To  quicken  the  pace  of 
his  plans  he  also  proposed  to  engage  existing  military  units  in  a  number  of 
small  states  in  Germany  on  a  temporary  basis,  as  had  been  common  practice 
in  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century:  the  system  of  seigneurial 
recruitment.  Although  the  national  element  of  Bouchenroder's  army  was  a 
volunteer  force  it  implied  no  return  to  the  army  of  the  eighteenth  century.  In 
peacetime  this  army  would  exist  only  on  paper  since  the  volunteer  citizens 
would  remain  in  their  hometowns  as  a  sedentary  force  at  the  disposal  of 
and  under  the  authority  of  the  local  government.  Only  in  times  of  crisis  or 
imminent  war  would  they  march  and  be  incorporated  into  the  regiments  of 
the  national  army,  commanded  by  the  head  of  state  as  supreme  commander 
and  his  General  Staff.  And  only  then  would  they  be  trained  as  soldiers  fit 
for  real  warfare.  This  meant  that,  quite  intentionally,  in  peacetime  the 
volunteers  serving  in  this  army  would  have  to  deal  only  with  their  local 
masters,  the  well-respected  aristocratic  families  who  had  governed  the  city 
within  living  memory.  Their  hometown,  where  they  would  also  do  their 
initial  training,  would  be  the  garrison  base.  In  fact  Bouchenroder's  plan 
aimed  at  the  transformation  of  the  former  town  militias  into  a  national 
volunteer  force,  while  retaining  the  upper  hand  for  the  local  elites  in  the 
debates  with  the  sovereign  that  would  inevitably  unfold  in  times  of  crisis.  As 
a  matter  of  fact  this  corresponded  beautifully  with  the  state  Van  Hogendorp 
had  in  mind  at  that  time:  one  in  which  the  traditional  estates  would  have 
sufficient  countervailing  power  against  the  king  and  the  centralization  of 
the  administration. 

Bouchenroder's  project  was  short-lived,  however.  On  30  November  1813 
Prince  William  Frederick,  the  eldest  son  of  the  last  Stadtholder,  returned 
to  the  Netherlands  and  assumed  power  as  sovereign  prince.  It  goes  without 
saying  that  he  was  not  pleased  with  this  rather  complex  project  when  it  was 
presented  to  him  on  7  December  1813.  In  his  eyes  Bouchenroder's  army  was 
certainly  too  weak  to  wage  war  against  the  French.  But,  above  all,  to  have 

20  NA  Stamboek  officieren  van  de  Landmacht  1813-1924,  204-124;  de  Bas,  Prins  Frederik,  III-i, 
p.  198. 

21  His  plan  is  to  be  found  in  NA  Archives  of  the  Generale  Staf  van  de  Koninklijke  Landmacht 
1813-1918  (1939)  543  and  NA  ASS  6591. 


458 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


no  proper  army  at  his  disposal  in  peacetime  and  to  be  dependent  on  the 
collaboration  of  the  local  communities  for  the  creation  of  one  in  times  of 
crisis,  simply  was  beyond  anything  he  was  ready  to  consider.  He  dismissed 
Bouchenroder,  disbanded  his  administrative  office,  sent  him  on  a  mission 
into  Germany,  and  finally  granted  him  a  pension.  The  shelving  of  Bouchen- 
roder's  army  closed  an  era  since  it  was  the  last  time  that  the  army  of  the 
state  was  conceived  of  as  a  bottom-up  force.  It  intended  to  recruit  volunteer 
citizens  for  the  state's  army  without  resorting  to  top-down  conscription.  As 
such,  his  project  was  to  be  the  last  in  the  tradition  of  the  Patriot  Free  Corps 
and  exercise  societies  as  well  as  the  Dutch-  or  French-style  National  Guard. 
From  now  on,  organizing,  forming,  training,  and  commanding  the  army  were 
the  business  of  the  state,  even  if  this  involved  calling  up  citizens  for  the  army. 

The  only  place  where  armed  service  in  local  units  lived  on  was  outside  the 
army:  the  so-called  Schutterijen.  These  local  militias  were  reintroduced  as  a 
police  force  at  the  disposal  of  the  local  authorities  and  were  supervised  not 
by  the  Department  of  War,  but  by  Home  Affairs.  Sure  enough,  the  Schutterij 
Act  contained  provisions  that  permitted  the  Schutterijen  to  serve  as  a  citizen 
force  of  last  resort  alongside  the  army  in  times  of  crisis,  but  after  the  War 
of  the  Belgian  Secession  (1830-1839)  military  experts  considered  this  an 
increasingly  unsatisfactory  arrangement.22 

The  army  William  Frederick  wanted  for  himself  was  an  eighteenth- 
century-style  all-volunteer  professional,  standing  army.  This  was  to  be  a 
royal  army,  with  officers  commissioned  by  him  and  soldiers  committed  to 
him.  It  would  be  a  symbol  of  his  dignity,  shore  up  his  throne  and  his  dynasty, 
represent  the  central  state  on  the  local  level  in  the  garrison  towns,  and  be 
an  instrument  of  his  foreign  policy.  It  was  to  be  ready  to  wage  war  within  as 
well  as  beyond  the  borders.  Once  enlisted,  the  soldiers  would  in  fact  quit  civil 
society  and  their  local  community.  They  would  enter  a  separate  sphere,  that 
of  the  state  and  national  interest  as  embodied  by  the  king.  On  the  other  hand, 

22  Schutterij  Act  of  27  December  1815,  Staatsblad  7875 ,  no.  20,  and  Recueil Mititair,  bevattende 
de  wetten,  bestuiten  en  ordres,  betreffende  de  koninklijke  Nederlandse  landmagt  1873-7374  (The 
Hague:  Van  Cleef,  1815-1914),  vol.  7875  [henceforth,  RecueU  with  year],  I,  pp.  382-431;  Schutterij 
Act  of  11  April  1827,  Staatsblad  782/,  no.  17;  Sickesz,  Schutterijen  in  Nederland,  pp.  215-216;  van 
Dam  van  Isselt,  De  ontwikkeling  vanons  krijgswezen  sedert  7873,  p.  10;  Schoenmaker,  Burgerzin  en 
soldatengeest,  pp.  396-397.  The  ideal  of  an  army  completely  made  up  of  amateur  soldiers,  trained 
in  their  free  time  outside  the  barracks  and  meant  to  be  "polder-guerrillas",  re-emerged  at  the  turn 
of  the  century,  stimulated  by  among  other  things  the  Swiss  example  and  the  Anglo-Boer  War. 
This  people's  army  (Volksleger)  concept  was  supported  by  left-liberals  and  social  democrats.  It 
was  heavily  opposed  by  the  military  establishment  and  never  developed  into  a  serious  threat  to 
the  cadre-militia  army  concept.  See  Klinkert,  Hetvadertandverdedigd,  pp.  209-216;  Amersfoort, 
"Lodewijk  Thomson,  militair  waarnemer",  Dienstplicht,  draagvlak  en  democratic 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


459 


William  Frederick  very  well  understood  that  an  all-volunteer  force  would 
be  slow  to  come  into  being.  Given  the  limits  of  the  population  -  some  2.2 
million  at  the  time  -  and  foreign  recruitment  sources  drying  up,  conscription 
would  inevitably  have  a  part  to  play  as  well.  But  this  implied  that  at  some 
time  a  conscription  bill  would  have  to  be  passed  by  the  parliament,  giving 
it  ample  opportunity  to  meddle  in  a  domain  William  Frederick  considered 
his  prerogative.  This  explains  why  from  1813  onwards  army  recruitment 
was  pursued  along  two  parallel  lines,  namely  voluntary  enrolment  and 
conscription.  They  raised  the  complement  for  two  different,  even  separate 
parts  of  the  army,  the  so-called  Standing  Army  and  the  national  militia, 
each  of  which  had  its  own  function  in  the  country's  defence. 

William  Frederick's  army 

In  early  1814,  the  formation  of  a  volunteer  mobile  army  was  William  Freder- 
ick's priority.  Alongside  the  on-going  war  against  France  and  the  participa- 
tion in  the  allied  war  effort,  William  Frederick  had  another  reason  to  make 
his  army  as  strong  as  possible.  Britain  coveted  a  'special  relationship'  with 
William  Frederick  and  his  kingdom.23  In  Britain's  strategy  the  Netherlands 
were  an  advance  post  for  the  deployment  of  the  British  army  on  the  continent 
in  case  of  future  French  expansionism.  This  was  a  rehabilitation  of  the  role 
the  United  Provinces  had  played  in  the  coalition  wars  against  France  up 
to  1748.  Before  and  after  the  battle  of  Waterloo,  Wellington  urged  William 
Frederick  to  be  relentless  in  his  efforts  to  build  up  an  army  strong  enough 
to  withstand  an  initial  French  invasion.  This  army  was  to  buy  time  for  the 
British  expeditionary  force  to  join  the  war.24  As  from  September  1815  Britain 
supervised  and  co-financed  the  construction  of  a  series  of  fortified  towns  in 
the  Southern  Netherlands  (the  'Southern  Frontier')  which  represented  the 
re-establishment  of  the  old  barriere  that  had  been  demolished  by  the  French 
in  the  course  of  the  War  of  the  Austrian  Succession.25  For  his  part  William 
Frederick  was  eager  to  play  the  role  assigned  to  him  by  London.  For  some 
time  he  even  aimed  at  the  union  of  the  Netherlands  and  his  Nassau  posses- 
sions in  Germany,  by  including  the  Rhineland  in  his  kingdom.  This  would 

23  Van  Sas,  Onze  natuurlijkste  bondgenoot. 

24  See,  for  example,  Wellington  to  Castlereagh,  29  April  1816,  in  Colenbrander,  Gedenkstukken 
der  algemeene  geschiedenis  van  Nederland,  VIII-i,  p.  31;  William  Fredrick  to  Clancarty,  4  April 
1814,  ibid.,  VII,  p.  756. 

25  Uitterhoeve,  Cornells  Kraijenhoff  7758-7840,  pp.  289-363. 


460 


HERMAN  AMERSF00RT 


have  made  his  state  a  power  of  the  middle  rank  and  would  have  restored  the 
pre-1748  position  of  the  United  Provinces  in  the  European  balance  of  power. 

Now  all  this  pointed  in  the  same  direction:  the  creation  of  a  strong, 
all-volunteer  field  army.  To  enable  it  to  operate  independently,  all  arms 
were  included  in  this  force,  which  came  to  be  called  the  Standing  Army.  The 
first  organization  (January  1814)  provided  for  six  rifle  battalions,  sixteen 
line  battalions  of  infantry,  four  regiments  of  cavalry,  four  foot  battalions  of 
artillery,  one  corps  of  horse  artillery,  one  battalion  of  pontonneers,  miners 
and  sappers,  and  one  support  (train)  battalion.  It  had  a  total  strength  of 
30,241  men,  of  whom  21,884  were  in  the  infantry.26  When  after  Waterloo 
and  the  Treaty  of  Paris  the  threat  of  war  receded,  the  Standing  Army  was 
given  a  more  general  task.  It  was  conceived  of  as  the  operationally  ready 
unit  of  the  army,  permanently  under  arms,  out  of  which  a  mobile  army 
could  instantly  be  drawn  and  despatched  to  the  borders  to  ward  off  at- 
tacks. Moreover,  the  king  (on  16  March  1815  William  Frederick  proclaimed 
himself  king  of  the  United  Northern  and  Southern  Netherlands)  could  at 
any  time  send  a  corps  of  the  Standing  Army  to  the  colonies  -  a  necessary 
provision  since  there  was  no  separate  colonial  army  until  the  early  1830s. 
Hence  the  Standing  Army  carried  on  the  eighteenth-century  tradition  of 
recruitment  and  organization:  enlistment  of  volunteers,  the  possibility  of 
conducting  operations  beyond  the  country's  borders  and  in  the  colonies, 
and  a  comprehensive  organization  with  the  inclusion  of  all  arms. 


Table  15.1  Annual  salary  of  officers 


Rank 

Salary  per  annum  in  Dutch  guilders  (DFL) 

Colonel 

4,500 

Lieutenant-colonel 

3,000 

Major 

2,200 

Captain 

1,600 

First  lieutenant 

900 

Second  lieutenant 

700 

The  officers  in  the  Standing  Army  were  appointed  and  promoted  by  the 
sovereign  and  engaged  for  an  indefinite  period  of  time.27  Moreover,  their 

26  Hardenberg,  Overzigt  der  voornaamste  bepalingen,  II,  p.  14;  Sovereign  Decree  of  9  January 
1814  in  Recueil  7813-1814, 1,  pp.  74-83. 

27  Hardenberg,  Overzigt  der  voornaamste  bepalingen,  II,  pp.  7-27, 53-60,  63-73,  76-83, 100-104. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


461 


engagement  ended  by  royal  decree  as  well,  whether  at  the  officer's  request 
or  not.  The  pensions  officers  enjoyed  after  their  resignation  were  granted  to 
them  as  a  royal  favour  and  came  at  the  charge  of  the  treasury,  no  contribu- 
tions being  due  by  the  officers  concerned  during  their  engagement.  Officers 
enjoyed  a  salary  calculated  as  an  annual  sum  which  was  paid  to  them  in 
twelve  equal  terms.  Infantry  salaries  are  shown  in  Table  15.1,  all  expenses  for 
lodging,  clothing,  food,  and  personal  armament  being  at  their  own  charge. 
NCOs  and  soldiers  were  engaged  and  if  they  wished,  re-engaged  on  two-, 
four-,  or  six-year  contracts,  the  first  contract  always  starting  in  the  rank  of 
soldier.  The  minimum  age  of  the  recruit  was  eighteen  years  (or  seventeen 
with  parental  consent)  with  the  maximum  being  forty.  Preferably  they  were 
unmarried.  Minimum  height  was  1.596  metres.  For  a  two-year  contract  the 
soldier  received  a  bounty  of  DFL 10,  which  was  considerably  lower  than  the 
bounties  paid  before  1795  when  sums  ranging  from  forty  to  sixty  guilders 
had  been  normal.  Soldiers  and  NCOs  were  paid  a  sum  calculated  on  a  daily 
basis,  depending  on  the  position  they  were  in  (in  the  barracks,  on  leave,  in 
hospital,  in  detention,  etc.).  Apart  from  that,  they  received  a  pound  of  bread 
every  three  days.  Lodging,  clothing,  armaments,  and  equipment  were  at  the 
charge  of  the  regiment.  Soldiers  and  NCOs  ate  their  meals  together  in  their 
chambrees,  the  room  they  lived  and  slept  in.28  Meals  (a  stew  of  vegetables, 
beans,  rice  or  potatoes,  and  meat,  fish  or  bacon)  were  at  their  own  expenses. 
To  this  end  the  pay  of  all  soldiers  in  a  company  was  put  into  a  common  fund 
and  used  to  purchase  ingredients  for  the  meals,  the  so-called  menage  system. 
Every  five  days  any  remaining  cash  was  distributed  among  the  soldiers 
according  to  their  rank  as  their  pocket-money.  To  protect  the  rank  and  file 
against  rising  food  prices,  the  regiment  guaranteed  minimum  pocket-money 
of  DFL  0.25  every  five  days,  which  left  the  soldier  DFL  18.25  on  a  yearly  basis. 
When  in  the  barracks  the  NCOs'  and  soldiers'  pay  were  as  shown  in  Table  15.2. 


Table  15.2  Annual  pay  of  non-commissioned  officers  and  soldiers 


Rank 

Pay  per  annum  in  Dutch  guilders  (DFL) 

Sergeant-major 

292 

Sergeant 

237.25 

Corporal 

127.75 

Soldier 

91.25 

28  The  lodging  of  the  garrison  was  provided  for  by  the  local  town  authorities.  Since  the 
Netherlands  had  few  purpose-built  barracks,  old  schools,  factories,  and  so  on  were  used. 


462 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


At  virtually  the  same  time  as  the  inception  of  the  new  standing  army, 
regulations  were  introduced  to  raise  troops  by  means  of  conscription.  These 
were  to  be  the  militia  units  of  the  army.  To  avoid  association  with  conscrip- 
tion during  the  Napoleonic  period,  the  militia,  although  an  integral  part  of 
the  army,  was  initially  quite  separate  from  the  mobile  operational  part.  To 
begin  with,  until  1817  the  militia  consisted  almost  exclusively  of  infantry.  In 
January  1814  the  infantry  of  the  militia  had  a  complement  of  21,920  men,  of 
whom  18,840  were  organized  in  twenty  infantry-battalions  and  3,080  men 
organized  in  four  battalions  of  supporting  artillery.29  The  earliest  regulation, 
the  ReglementvanAlgemene  Volkswapening  (20  December  1813),  conceived 
of  the  militia  (the  so-called  Landmilitie)  as  a  force  recruited  out  of  the 
so-called  Landstorm,  a  home  guard,  which  can  best  be  compared  with  the 
town  militias  (Schutterijeri)  that  had  existed  before  1795.30  The  Reglement 
assumed  that  the  Landmilitie  would  be  made  up  mainly  of  volunteers,  i.e. 
Landstorm-men  who  offered  to  do  their  period  of  service  on  a  voluntary 
basis.  Only  if  the  numbers  of  volunteers  fell  short  of  that  required  would  civil 
registration  be  used  to  select  by  lot  the  additional  men  needed.  Needless 
to  say,  the  reality  was  the  other  way  around,  with  hardly  any  Landstorm- 
men  willing  to  serve  voluntarily  (some  of  them  were  even  pressed  or  paid 
by  local  government  wanting  to  get  rid  of  their  undesirable  subjects  and 
avoid  conscription  for  others)  and  the  great  majority  of  them  being  forcibly 
recruited. 

The  fact  that  the  Landmilitie  was  recruited  from  the  Landstorm  may  at 
first  sight  be  interpreted  as  a  continuation  of  the  line  of  thought  behind 
Bouchenroder's  force.  But  in  contrast  to  Bouchenroder's  project  the  local 
origins  of  the  Landmilitie  had  no  practical  implications,  as  this  provision 
in  the  December  1813  Reglement  was  a  meaningless  phrase  to  sugar  the  pill 
of  the  first  form  of  Dutch  conscription.  Bouchenroder's  force  would  have 
been  firmly  rooted  in  the  local  town  community.  Only  in  times  of  crisis  it 
would  have  been  organized  as  a  national  army  under  the  command  of  the 
sovereign.  Certainly,  the  word  Landin  the  name  of  the  Landmilitie  referred 
to  the  local  community  and  its  task  was  territorial  defence,  i.e.,  the  protec- 
tion and  defence  of  their  own  areas.  But,  in  contrast  to  Bouchenroder's 
force,  from  the  very  start  the  Landmilitie  was  perceived  by  the  sovereign 

29  Sovereign  Decree  of  21  January  1814;  Van  Dam  van  Isselt,  De  ontwikkeling  vanons  krijgswezen 
sederti8i3,  pp.  2-3. 

30  "Proclamatie  tot  aanmoediging  der  vrijwillige  wapening",  6  December  1813:  Van  Dam 
van  Isselt,  De  ontwikkeling  van  ons  krijgswezen  sedert  7873,  pp.  2-3;  Hardenberg,  Overzigt  der 
voornaamste  bepalingen,  II,  pp.  20-21,  25;  for  the  Reglement  van  Algemene  Volkswapening 
(20  December  1813),  see  Staatsblad  7873-7874,  no.  14. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


463 


as  force  at  his  disposal,  separate  from  but  parallel  to  the  army:  a  means  to 
free  the  Standing  Army  from  garrison  duties  and  territorial  defence,  now 
that  a  mobile  army  had  to  be  formed.  As  such  it  was  a  force  somewhere 
halfway  between  Bouchenroder's  project  and  conscription.  In  hindsight  it 
was  in  many  respects  a  temporary  arrangement  and  a  typical  product  of 
the  turbulent  last  months  of  the  war  against  Napoleon. 

The  Reglement  had  been  promulgated  by  the  sovereign  prince  without  the 
consent  of  the  States-General.  In  fact  it  was  no  more  than  a  one-time  requisi- 
tion to  meet  the  urgent  manpower  demands  of  the  moment.  It  contained 
no  provisions  for  the  future.  These  defects  were  remedied  by  the  Conscrip- 
tion Act  of  27  February  1815. 31  Like  the  Reglement,  the  act  conceived  of  the 
militia,  now  renamed  the  National  Militia,  as  an  independent  organization, 
separate  from  the  Standing  Army.  The  act  went  even  further  by  separating 
the  national  militia  from  the  Landstorm  as  well.  The  concept  that  military 
service  for  the  state  was  rooted  in  some  local  force  was  now  a  thing  of  the 
past.  As  from  1815  the  militia  rested  upon  conscription,  comparable  to  the 
French  system  of  the  Loijourdan-Delbrel  of  1798. 

It  was  now  also  possible  for  the  militia  to  take  part  in  the  operational 
tasks  of  the  Standing  Army.  In  this  instance,  the  militia  was  called  to  arms 
and  made  mobile,  that  is  to  say,  divorced  from  its  local  ties  and  dispatched 
to  the  Standing  Army.  The  Dutch  troops  at  Quatre-Bras  and  Waterloo  in 
June  1815  consisted  partly  of  line  battalions,  from  both  the  Northern  and 
Southern  Netherlands,  and  partly  of  militia  battalions  from  the  Northern 
Netherlands.  Actions  beyond  the  country's  borders,  however,  could  be 
ordered  only  with  the  consent  of  the  parliament;  hence,  special  legislation 
had  to  be  introduced  to  enable  the  militia  to  take  part  in  the  campaign  of 
1815.  Militia  conscripts  could  only  be  asked  to  serve  on  a  voluntary  basis 
with  the  navy,  and  under  no  circumstance  were  militia  units  to  be  sent  to 
the  colonies. 

Contrary  to  the  requisition-based  Landmilitie,  the  National  Militia  now 
rested  upon  true  conscription,  every  new  yearly  cohort  being  registered  by 
the  local  authorities.  There  was  to  be  a  maximum  annual  intake  of  1  per 
cent  of  the  population,  making  22,000  men  available  for  the  militia.  After 
five  yearly  levies,  the  militia  would  thus  reach  a  wartime  total  strength 
of  110,000  men  in  the  age  range  of  eighteen  to  twenty-two  years  old.  For 
recruiting  purposes,  the  kingdom  was  divided  into  ten  militia  districts 
of  100,000  inhabitants,  each  district  consisting  of  ten  militia  cantons. 
All  twenty-four  battalions  of  the  militia  were  attached  to  a  district  from 


31    Staatsblad.1815,  no.  19.  See  also Recueil  1813, 1,  pp.  382-431. 


464 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


which  they  drew  their  recruits.  In  March  all  eighteen-year-old  men  had  to 
present  themselves  before  the  Militia  Council  of  their  district  for  physical 
examination  and  had  to  take  part  in  the  loting,  the  drawing  of  numbers. 
The  lowest  numbers  (the  "bad  numbers",  as  the  conscripts  used  to  say) 
were  then  enlisted  to  fill  the  contingent  of  the  district  and  sent  to  their 
regiment  no  later  than  1  April.  Wage-earners  and  theological  students 
were  exempted  from  conscription.  Conscription  was  further  mitigated 
by  allowing  substitution  and  the  exchange  of  numbers  in  the  draw.  This 
was  subject  to  two  conditions:  the  substitute  must  have  lived  in  the  same 
province  as  the  conscript  for  fifteen  months  preceding  the  first  day  of 
service  and,  secondly,  it  would  only  be  possible  to  exchange  numbers  with 
someone  in  the  same  intake  and  from  the  same  municipality.  The  consider- 
able sums  (100  Dutch  guilders,  the  equivalent  of  a  year's  pay  for  a  private, 
being  typical)  needed  to  find  someone  willing  to  serve  as  a  substitute  or 
after  an  exchange  of  numbers  meant  that  this  mitigation  extended  only 
to  the  well-to-do  and  well-educated  sections  of  society.  Within  a  couple  of 
years  of  the  introduction  of  conscription,  insurance  and  broker  companies 
appeared  on  the  marketplace  to  match  those  offering  to  serve  as  substitutes 
and  those  wanting  to  avoid  serving  in  person.  Over  the  nineteenth  century 
some  15-20  per  cent  of  the  militia  normally  consisted  of  substitutes.32 

After  initial  training  in  the  depot  of  the  regiment,  from  1  April  onwards 
the  fresh  conscripts  were  joined  by  reservists  of  previous  years  in  May 
and  trained  with  them  as  well  as  with  battalions  of  the  Standing  Army 
during  the  "summer  exercises"  until  15  June.  After  the  summer  exercises 
one-quarter  of  the  total  militia  (125  per  cent  of  the  yearly  intake)  returned 
to  barracks  to  perform  garrison  duties  during  the  winter  and  to  provide  for 
the  trained  nucleus  of  the  battalions  when  the  new  conscripts  arrived  in 
April  the  following  year.  All  others  were  sent  home  to  enjoy  their  leave.  The 
so-called  remaining  part  of  the  militia  was  composed  of  different  kinds  of 
conscripts.  In  the  first  place  those  who  had  tried  to  evade  conscription  by 
not  appearing  before  the  Militia  Council  were  tracked  down  and  sent  to 
their  regiment  to  serve  for  the  full  five  years.  Ipso  facto,  they  were  allotted  to 
the  remaining  part.  Secondly,  every  conscript  had  the  right  to  volunteer  for 
the  remaining  part  as  a  way  of  earning  a  living.  Thirdly,  all  substitutes  were 
incorporated  in  the  remaining  part  since  they  served  the  full  five-year  term 
of  their  conscription.  The  remaining  part  was  then  completed  by  having  all 
other  conscripts  draw  numbers,  with  the  exception  of  those  who  had  been 
in  the  remaining  part  in  previous  years. 


32   Bevaart,  De  Nederlandse  Defensie,  p.  197. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


465 


Given  the  peculiarities  of  this  system  the  time  a  conscript  had  to  spend 
in  the  barracks  could  vary  significantly33  Those  who  proved  to  be  physi- 
cally unfit,  those  drawing  a  "good  number"  and  those  whose  parents  could 
afford  a  number-swapper  or  a  substitute  did  not  enter  the  barracks  at  all. 
Those  serving  in  person  spent  two-and-a-half  months  in  the  barracks 
and  the  training  facilities,  while  conscripts  in  the  remaining  part  spent 
fourteen-and-a-half  months  in  the  army.  Punished  conscription-evaders, 
substitutes,  and  volunteers  soldiered  for  the  full  five  years.  As  from  the 
summer  exercises  of  1820,  the  conscription  burden  was  increased,  since  from 
then  on  the  annual  exercise  was  held  in  September  and  October,  adding 
a  four-month  period  to  the  terms  mentioned  above.  All  conscripts  served 
under  the  same  administrative  regulations  as  the  volunteers  in  the  Standing 
Army  and  received  the  same  daily  pay.  The  officers  and  NCOs  who  com- 
manded the  militia  battalions  technically  belonged  to  the  Standing  Army. 
Conscripts  had  the  right  to  opt  for  promotion  to  the  rank  of  NCO,  provided 
they  met  the  qualifications  (mastering  the  basics  of  reading,  writing,  and 
basic  mathematics)  or,  in  case  of  illiteracy,  were  prepared  to  attend  the 
courses  in  the  company's  school.34 

Over  the  years  following  1815  the  importance  of  conscription  and  the 
National  Militia  increased.  As  regards  the  standing  army,  soon  after  its 
inauguration  it  proved  to  be  impossible  to  reach  the  required  numbers  by 
voluntary  recruitment.  The  number  of  men  obtained  from  the  French  army, 
or  returning  from  Prussian,  Austrian,  Russian,  and  British  captivity,  was 
insufficient  to  meet  demands,  even  when  the  six  rifle  battalions  and  sixteen 
line  battalions  of  infantry  were  reduced  to  four  and  twelve  respectively  in 
September  1814.  In  April  1814  the  combined  actual  strength  of  the  Standing 
Army  (the  two  regiments  from  Nassau  included)  and  the  militia  amounted  to 
a  meagre  28,232  men.  And  in  spite  of  all  efforts  in  February  1815  the  situation 
was  only  slightly  better.  Now  34,094  men  were  in  William  Frederick's  pay.35 

For  a  while  it  was  hoped  that  the  recruitment  of  foreigners,  for  which 
considerable  funds  were  available,  would  make  up  the  full  complement 
of  men  but,  as  has  been  shown,  this  proved  an  illusion.  This  naturally  in- 
creased the  reliance  on  conscription  and  explains  among  other  things  why 
the  Militia  Act  of  February  1815  had  to  supersede  the  Reglement.  With  the 
first  volunteer  contracts  for  the  Standing  Army  expiring  from  1817  onwards 

33  Amersfoort,  Koning  en  Kanton,  pp.  78-79. 

34  Snapper,  "Het  negentiende  eeuwse  Nederlandse  leger". 

35  Wiipperman,  De  vorming  van  het Nederlandsche  leger  na  de  omwenteting,  pp.  4-6;  NA  ASS 
no.  6568,  Exhibitum,  24  March  1815,  no.  12. 


466 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


the  standing  army  gradually  lost  men  to  the  militia,  with  former  volunteers 
re-engaging  as  substitutes  with  the  militia.36  The  considerable  desertion 
from  the  ranks  of  the  standing  army,  which  had  the  same  background, 
further  increased  this  effect.  The  repeated  pardons  for  deserters  are  an 
indication  that  the  problem  was  in  fact  insoluble.37  The  king's  bounty  of  10 
guilders  for  service  in  the  standing  army  was  much  less  than  that  of  the 
conscripts  who  wanted  to  avoid  service. 

Already  towards  the  end  of  1815  it  appeared  necessary  to  find  a  solution 
to  the  shortage  of  manpower  in  the  army.  The  only  way  out  seemed  to  be 
the  expansion  of  the  army's  militia  element.  A  first  step  in  that  direction 
was  the  formation  in  October  1815  of  seventeen  new,  larger  units,  the  so- 
called  Afdeelingen,  which  were  later  to  be  called  Regiments.38  Each  of  these 
consisted  of  three  battalions  of  National  Militia  and  one  line  battalion  of 
the  Standing  Army.  The  hope  of  the  Department  of  War  that  the  closer 
contact  between  volunteers  and  conscripts  would  tempt  the  latter  to  opt 
for  voluntary  service  was  soon  dashed.  The  next  step  was  an  increase  in 
the  number  of  arms  and  branches  in  the  organization  of  the  militia.  In 
1817,  cavalry  and  logistic  support  (train)  corps  were  added  to  the  militia's 
infantry  and  artillery.  Finally,  in  1819,  a  reorganization  was  started  which, 
in  effect,  amounted  to  the  complete  merging  of  the  Standing  Army  and 
the  National  Militia,  the  so-called  amalgame.39  Within  each  Afdeeling  the 
battalion  of  the  standing  army  was  spread  over  the  three  militia  battalions. 
As  a  result,  each  company  from  then  on  consisted  of  25  per  cent  regular 
personnel  and  75  per  cent  conscripts.  This  reorganization,  beginning  in  the 
infantry  with  the  other  arms  and  branches  following  suit,  was  completed 
in  1828.  In  the  same  period,  all  foreign  regiments  were  removed  from  the 
army's  organization.  The  consequences  for  the  strength  of  the  army  and  the 
numbers  present  in  the  barracks  in  autumn  1819  are  shown  in  Table  15.3.40 

36  Keyzer  to  dAubreme,  28  May  1818,  no.  10,  Archives  of  the  Ministerie  van  Oorlog  [henceforth, 
MvO]  Geheim  Archief  [henceforth,  GA]  11. 

37  Mollerus  to  Soeverein  Vorst,  15  June  1814,  in  Colenbrander,  Gedenkstukken  der  algemeene 
geschiedenis  van  Nederland,  VII,  pp.  598-599;  Sovereign  Decree  of  25  June  1814,  no.  59A,  in 
Staatsbladr8r4,  no.  71;  Mollerus  to  all  corps  of  the  army,  30  June  1814,  no.  13,  mRecueih8i3-78i4, 1, 
PP-  353"354;Janssens  to  all  corps  of  the  army,  4  August  1814,  no.  105,  ibid.,  II,  pp.  46i-46s;Janssens 
to  all  corps  of  the  army,  11  August  1814,  no.  14,  ibid.,  II,  pp.  468-469;  Mollerus  to  all  corps  of  the 
Landmilitie,  20  December  1814,  no.  1,  ibid.,  II,  pp.  678-680. 

38  Royal  Decree,  8  October  1815,  in  Recueil  7875,  II,  pp.  93-98. 

39  Law  of  28  November  1818,  in  Noordziek,  Handelingen  van  de  Staten  Generaal gedurende  de 
vergaderingen  van  7874-heden,  787S-7S79,  pp.  6-8,  29-47,  and  Annexes,  pp.  18-23;  Recueil  7878,  II, 
pp.  121-141;  Staatsblad7878,  no.  41. 

40  Hardenberg,  Overzigt  der  voornaamste  bepalingen,  II,  pp.  139-140. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 
Table  15.3  Strength  of  the  army  in  1819 


467 


1819 

Total 

Reservists  on 

Present  in  the  bar- 

strength 

leave 

racks 

Numbers 

112,818 

62,894 

49,924 

Proportion  in  % 

100 

55.7 

44.3 

Source:  Hardenberg,  Overzigt  der  voornaamste  bepalingen,  II,  pp.  139-140 

The  importance  of  these  rapid  developments  can  hardly  be  exaggerated. 
Originally,  in  1813,  William  Frederick  had  intended  to  rely  on  the  partly 
foreign,  partly  Dutch  regular  personnel  of  the  Standing  Army  to  make 
up  the  operational  field  army.  The  militia  would  see  to  territorial  defence 
and  security  at  the  local  level.  Moreover,  it  was  expected  that  voluntary 
enlistment  would  provide  a  portion  of  the  manpower  for  the  militia.  The 
hated  conscription  could  thus  be  restricted  as  much  as  possible.  Within  a 
few  years,  however,  conscription  had  become  the  foundation  on  which  army 
manpower  rested,  and  it  was  clear  that  the  bulk  of  the  mobile  army,  in  the 
eventuality  of  war,  would  have  to  consist  of  conscripts,  while  the  officers 
and  NCOs  would  be  made  up  of  regular  personnel  from  the  Standing  Army. 
So  after  a  rapid  succession  of  events  the  Dutch  population  accepted,  albeit 
grudgingly,  the  transformation  of  armed  service  on  a  voluntary  basis  in  the 
local  community  into  full-blown  conscription  for  the  army  of  the  state.  The 
road  for  this  remarkable  development  had  been  paved  by  foreign  rulers,  King 
Louis  Napoleon  and  the  French  emperor.  After  1813  the  Dutch  population 
put  up  with  the  national  conscription  system  as  it  had  done  before  with 
French  conscription:  it  was  a  very  unpleasant,  even  hated  interruption  of 
normal  civilian  life  but  this  sentiment  would  never  disrupt  the  smooth 
working  of  the  system.  In  the  end  each  year  in  March  the  new  conscripts 
responded  to  the  call-up  to  appear  before  the  Militia  Council  and  underwent 
the  administrative  logic  of  the  Conscription  Act.  Certainly,  some  conscripts 
tried  to  evade  military  service,  by  not  appearing  before  the  Militia  Council, 
or  by  deceit,  self-mutilation,  or  desertion;  some  escaped  conscription  thanks 
to  administrative  errors.  But  it  is  important  to  note  that  these  acts  of  resist- 
ance and  their  underlying  sentiments  remained  strictly  individual  and 
personal.41  They  never  reached  levels  of  organized,  let  alone  political  or 
violent,  resistance.  Middle-class  and  upper-class  conscripts  would  certainly 

41  Even  French  conscription  had  been  accepted  by  the  Dutch  as  a  detested  but  unavoidable 
fact  of  life:  Joor,  De  adelaar  en  het  Lam,  pp.  451-454;  Welten,  In  dienstvoor  Napoleons  Europese 
droom. 


468 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


have  been  able  to  articulate  their  objections  in  the  political  arena,  but 
they  had  other  means  of  staying  out  of  the  barracks:  number-swapping 
and  substitution. 

However,  this  is  not  to  say  that  the  introduction  of  conscription  was 
without  political  consequences.  On  the  contrary,  already  in  1813  the  abrupt 
dismissal  of  Bouchenroder  and  his  proposed  army  by  William  Frederick 
and  his  decision  to  opt  for  a  royal  all-volunteer  force  raised  an  important 
political-military  question:  to  whom  would  the  army  belong?  If  the  army 
was  segmented  into  local  militias,  only  to  be  brought  together  under  royal 
command  in  times  of  crisis  and  after  the  consent  of  the  local  elites,  for  all 
practical  purposes  it  belonged  to  the  local  aristocracies.  They  and  nobody 
else  would  have  a  firm  grip  on  the  local  military  labour  market.  In  this 
case,  in  peacetime,  the  central  state  and  the  king  would  have  no  direct 
access  to  the  manpower  hidden  in  the  population  from  which  to  raise  an 
army.  If,  however,  the  army  belonged  to  the  state  and  the  king,  it  would  be 
a  true  national  army.  In  this  case,  the  state  would  be  given  direct  access  to 
individual  citizens,  be  it  via  voluntary  enlistment  on  the  military  labour 
market  or  by  force  of  law,  the  Conscription  Act.  As  William  Frederick  did 
not  hesitate  to  choose  the  latter  option,  this  implied  that,  as  far  as  the 
military  was  concerned,  the  local  community  was  in  fact  broken  up  in 
favour  of  the  state.  Conscription  -  being  technically  speaking  a  tax-levy  in 
kind,  irrespective  of  the  sweet  words  spoken  of  citizenship  and  voluntary 
conscription  -  was  only  added  to  the  list  of  already  existing  taxes  from  the 
central  government.  This,  of  course,  required  the  co-operation  of  the  same 
local  elites,  since  they  dominated  the  States-General  that  had  to  pass  the 
Conscription  Bill.  But  here  they  were  ready  to  grant  their  consent,  given 
the  provisions,  among  others,  for  substitution  and  number-swapping  which 
favoured  them  more  than  anybody  else. 

So,  at  the  heart  of  question  was  the  fact  that,  in  the  end,  the  modern  state 
and  its  conscripted  army  on  the  one  hand  and  the  local  community  on  the 
other,  were  mutually  exclusive.  This  was  visible  not  merely  in  the  National 
Militia  and  the  growing  importance  of  conscription.  The  same  problem 
presented  itself  in  the  other  part  of  the  army,  the  Standing  Army.  Here  the 
problem  focused  upon  the  four  Swiss  regiments  that  were  part  of  the  army 
organization  from  1814  to  1829.  It  took  some  time  for  the  problem  to  surface 
but,  when  it  did  appear,  it  soon  proved  insoluble.  The  Dutch  state  simply 
did  not  have  the  means  to  break  up  the  local  communities  in  the  Swiss 
cantons  the  way  it  had  done  at  home.  After  fifteen  troublesome  years,  the 
same  regiments  that  had  been  essential  to  the  army  when  they  arrived  on 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


469 


Dutch  soil  in  1814  and  following  years  had  to  be  dismissed.  Their  fate  thus 
confirms  the  conclusions  arrived  at  above. 

The  Swiss  regiments  1814-1829 

In  December  1813  William  Frederick  was  informed  by  envoys  he  had  sent 
to  Allied  headquarters  in  Frankfurt  that  the  Swiss  cantons  were  willing  to 
resume  raising  regiments  for  service  in  the  Netherlands,  as  they  had  done 
in  the  eighteenth  century.  This  prompted  him  to  send  Elie  van  der  Hoeven, 
an  offspring  of  an  aristocratic  family  from  Rotterdam,  on  a  mission  to  the 
Swiss  cantons,  giving  him  orders  to  conclude  contracts  (capitulations)  with 
the  governments  of,  if  possible,  all  Swiss  cantons  for  no  fewer  than  12,000 
troops  and  no  later  than  May  1814.42  Although  the  conditions  in  Switzerland 
were  by  no  means  as  favourable  as  The  Hague  had  been  led  to  believe  and  Van 
der  Hoeven  had  to  go  through  much  hard  bargaining  over  the  years  1814-1816, 
he  managed  to  conclude  capitulations  with  a  sufficient  number  of  cantons 
to  enlist  three  regiments  with  a  complement  of  some  2,000  men  each  and 
a  fourth  regiment  (no.  32)  of  3,000  men  from  the  Roman  Catholic  cantons 
in  central  Switzerland,  adding  a  total  of  9,000  professional  Swiss  soldiers  to 
the  king's  service.43  They  were  incorporated  in  the  Dutch  army  as  Regiments 
no.  29,  no.  30,  no.  31,  and  no.  32. 44  They  served  under  the  same  financial  and 
administrative  conditions  and  regulations  as  the  national  regiments,  with  the 
notable  exceptions  of  the  bounty  the  recruit  received  on  his  enlistment,  the 
travel  expenses,  and  the  provisions  for  regular  leaves.  To  cover  the  expenses 
for  recruitment  the  Treasury  paid  the  funds  of  the  Swiss  regiments  DFL  67.20 

42  Van  Hogendorp, Brieven  en gedenkschriften  van  GijsbertKarelvan Hogendorp,  IV,  pp.  206, 283- 
306,  V,  pp.  46-49, 216-220, 227, 260-261, 267-278, 282-292, 472-474;  Van  Spaen  to  Van  Hogendorp, 
28  December  1813,  NA  Archives  of  the  Ministerie  van  Buitenlandse  Zaken  1813-1870  [henceforth, 
BuZa]  4;  Van  Spaen  to  Van  Hogendorp,  29  December  1813,  no.  1,  NA  BuZa  4;  Van  Hogendorp  to 
Van  Spaen,  3  January  1814,  NA  BuZa  24;  Van  Hogendorp  to  Van  Spaen,  5  January  1814,  no.  3,  NA 
BuZa  24;  Memorandum  by  Van  der  Wijck,  7  January  1814,  NA  MvO  GA 1;  Van  Hogendorp  to  Van 
Spaen,  7  January  1814,  no.  4,  NA  BuZa  24.  The  Instruction  for  Van  der  Hoeven  can  be  found  in 
Sovereign  Decree  31  January  1814,  no.  216,  NA  ASS  5. 

43  The  capitulation  with  the  Canton  of  Bern,  concluded  23  September  1814,  was  the  model  for 
all  other  capitulations:  NA  Archives  of  the  Ministerie  van  Buitenlandse  Zaken  1813-1870,  Eerste 
Supplement  Ratificaties  1814-1900  [henceforth,  BuZa  Ratif icaties]  4.  See  also  Amersfoort,  Koning 
enKanton,  pp.  312-321. 

44  Amersfoort,  Koning  en  Kanton,  pp.  109-141.  A  complete  overview  of  the  distribution  of  all 
companies  over  the  capitulating  cantons  in  the  1814-1829  period  is  given  in  NA  BuZa  Ratificaties, 
as  well  as  in  Amersfoort,  Koning  en  Kanton,  pp.  322-324. 


470 


HERMAN  AMERSF00RT 


for  each  soldier  signing  a  four-year  contract  and  DFL  95.20  for  a  six-year 
contract.  National  corps  were  credited  with  DFL  28  for  a  six-year  contract. 
Bounties  paid  in  Switzerland  on  average  amounted  to  between  DFL  35  and 
DFL  70:  much  higher  than  the  DFL  10  offered  to  Dutch  recruits  enlisting 
for  the  national  corps.  As  part  of  the  Standing  Army  and  benefiting  from 
the  time-honoured  excellent  reputation  of  the  Swiss  soldier,  the  regiments 
were  given  vital  garrisons  in  the  border  areas  of  the  Northern  and,  after  1815, 
Southern  Netherlands.  Van  der  Hoeven  had  indeed  performed  his  duty  well. 

However,  over  the  years  after  1816  inspections  by  Dutch  military  au- 
thorities indicated  that,  in  violation  of  the  capitulations,  non- Swiss  soldiers 
served  with  the  regiments.  Other  soldiers  were  too  old  or  too  young  to  serve. 
Certain  companies  proved  to  be  severely  under  strength,  probably  due  to 
massive  desertion,  with  their  officers  being  absent,  spending  long  leaves 
in  their  canton,  allegedly  to  recruit.  At  first  the  Department  of  War  was 
inclined  simply  to  ignore  these  problems,  given  the  existing  difficulties 
of  recruiting  for  the  Standing  Army  from  the  Dutch  labour  market.45  But 
other  problems  came  to  the  fore  as  well.  Over  the  years  the  Department 
of  War  saw  itself  confronted  with  seemingly  never-ending  complaints  and 
requests  from  the  governments  of  the  Swiss  cantons  and  members  of  the 
aristocratic  families  from  which  these  governments  were  elected.  Most  of 
them  concerned  some  pretended  injustice  that  had  befallen  their  relatives, 
serving  as  an  officer  in  the  Netherlands.  These  letters  invariably  asked  for 
promotion,  better  pay,  longer  leaves,  appointments  of  cadets,  and  other 
personal  advantages  or  benefits  for  the  sons,  cousins,  nephews,  and  other 
relatives  of  the  cantonal  governing  families  or  the  families  with  which  they 
were  affiliated  in  business.  In  some  cases  a  whole  regiment  was  concerned. 
In  1818  the  government  of  Bern  requested  the  transfer  of  its  regiment  from 
the  town  of  Breda  to  Antwerp,  claiming  that  Breda  was  an  insupportably 
parochial  place  in  which  to  live  -  and  Roman  Catholic  at  that  -  and  that 
only  a  vibrant  city  such  as  Antwerp  could  offer  the  pleasures  and  cultural 
diversions  Bern  considered  its  native  sons  entitled  to.46 

45  Tindal  to  Von  der  Goltz,  28  December  1816,  no.  188,  NA  Archives  of  the  Ministerie  van  Oorlog 
1795-1844;  Collectie  Van  Thielen,  Archief  van  de  eerste  Inspecteur  Generaal  der  Infanterie 
lt.gen.  W.G.  Tindal  1816-1818  [henceforth,  IGI]  8;  Von  der  Goltz  to  Tindal,  3  February  1817,  no. 
4,  NA  IGI  2;  Von  der  Goltz  to  Van  der  Hoeven,  23  November  1816,  no.  1942,  NA  Archives  of  the 
Ministerie  van  Buitenlandse  Zaken,  Inventaris  van  de  Legatiearchieven  in  beheer  bij  de  Tweede 
Afdeling,  Legatie  Zwitserland  1814-1918  [henceforth,  Leg  Zw]  16;  Von  der  Goltz  to  Van  der  Hoeven, 
20  January  1817,  no.  38,  NA  Leg  Zw  16;  Von  der  Goltz  to  Tindal,  15  March  1817,  no.  112,  NA  IGI  2. 

46  Amersfoort,  Koning  en  Kanton,  pp.  179-182,  201-204;  DAubreme  to  the  King,  17  September 
1824,  La.  Eg  NA  MvO  GA  27. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


471 


The  most  serious  problems  were  revealed  in  Regiment  no.  32.  In  the 
eyes  of  the  Department  of  War,  the  commanding  officer  of  the  regiment, 
Major-General  Louis  d'Auf  der  Maur  from  the  canton  of  Schwyz,  proved  to 
be  nothing  less  than  a  fraud.  From  the  very  start  Auf  der  Maur  had  behaved 
not  as  a  responsible  officer,  respecting  the  regulations  of  the  Department 
of  War,  nor  as  a  loyal  servant  to  the  king,  but  as  a  sixteenth-century-style 
military  enterpriser.47  He  had  sold  commissions  to  the  highest  bidder  and 
had  offered  extremely  low  bounties  (some  DFL  15),  which  had  led  him  to 
enlist  vagabonds,  criminals,  and  ne'er-do-wells,  in  a  word  the  scum  of 
Europe.  Since  neither  the  Department  of  War  nor  Major  A.L.W.  Seyffardt 
(the  Dutch  muster  commissary  in  Switzerland)  had  been  too  inquisitive,  and 
since  Auf  der  Maur  had  covered  up  his  acts  with  forged  documents  provided 
to  him  by  an  accomplice  in  the  bosom  of  the  government  of  Schwyz,  both 
practices  had  gone  unnoticed  and  had  brought  Auf  der  Maur  considerable 
profit.48  The  most  lucrative  source  of  income  had  been  desertion.  As  the  rules 
were,  every  time  an  individual  enlisted  the  regiment  received  a  payment, 
the  level  of  which  was  fixed  in  the  capitulation.  This  might  be  higher  or 
lower  than  the  real  cost  of  recruitment,  depending  on  the  conditions  of  the 
labour  market  of  the  time.  Moreover,  every  enlisted  soldier  the  regiment 
lost  due  to  illness,  death,  or  desertion  was  a  charge  against  the  Treasury. 
This  was  the  logic  of  the  modern  state  in  which  the  regiments  of  the  army 
were  the  property  of  the  state.  In  the  logic  of  a  military  enterpriser  like  Auf 
der  Maur  these  rules  had  been  an  incentive  to  be  lenient  to  desertion,  even 
to  foster  it.  Moreover,  he  had  managed  to  implicate  most  of  the  regiment's 
officers  in  his  enterprise  by  offering  them  a  share  in  the  profits.49 

After  all  this  had  been  revealed  to  the  Department  of  War  in  The  Hague, 
August  count  of  Liedekerke,  a  nobleman  from  the  Southern  Netherlands 

47  Van  der  Hoeven  described  him  as  someone  "que  je  connais  pour  un  homme  a  projets  et 
entreprises".  In  1814  this  was  to  be  considered  a  recommendation:  Van  der  Hoeven  to  Van  Nagell, 
7  April  1814,  no.  15,  NA  BuZa  5;  Van  Liedekerke  to  Von  der  Goltz,  28  August  1817,  no.  17,  NA  Leg 
Zwi6;  Van  Liedekerke  to  Von  der  Goltz,  1  January  1818,  no.  26,  NA  Leg  Zw  16;  Van  Liedekerke  to 
Van  Nagell,  30  January  1818,  no.  44,  NA  ASS  6343;  Wagenaar  to  DAubreme,  25  August  1819,  T4 
NA  MvO  GA 16. 

48  The  accomplice  was  Landammann  F.X.  Weber.  Auf  der  Maur  appointed  him  as  recruit- 
ment officer  in  his  regiment,  in  which  capacity  Weber  also  shared  in  the  profits  of  Auf  der 
Maur's  enterprise.  Seyffardt  was  frequently  invited  to  stay  in  the  house  of  Auf  der  Maur  in  the 
Strehlgasse  in  Schwyz.  Nowadays  the  house  is  known  as  the  Hotel  Hediger,  after  the  Hedinger 
family  who  had  owned  it  previously. 

49  The  contract  concluded  to  this  effect  between  Auf  der  Maur  and  the  Council  of  Officers  of 
the  regiment  can  be  found  in  Hauptarchiv  Archiv  1  Akten  bis  1848  B  Kanton  Schwyz,  Staatsarchiv 
Schwyz  Switzerland,  554. 


472 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


and  permanent  envoy  to  the  Swiss  Confederation  since  April  1817,  was  given 
orders  to  lodge  official  complaints  against  the  cantons  concerned  and  to 
urge  their  governments  to  respect  the  capitulations  conscientiously.  Van 
Liedekerke,  however,  reacted  half-heartedly  On  the  one  hand  he  executed 
his  orders,  but  on  the  other  he  began  writing  a  series  of  long  dispatches 
explaining  to  the  Department  of  War  things  it  should  have  known  about 
the  Swiss  Confederation  or  apparently  had  forgotten  since  1795. 

To  begin  with,  Van  Liedekerke  explained  the  peculiarities  of  the  Swiss 
labour  market.50  In  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century  Switzerland  had 
developed  a  flourishing  textile  industry  and  textile  trade.  As  a  consequence 
wages  had  gone  up  considerably.  Already  in  the  eighteenth  century  this  had 
meant  that  even  rising  bounties  and  wages  for  foreign  service  had  only  been 
able  to  attract  soldiers  of  declining  quality.  Van  Liedekerke  pointed  out  that 
the  normal  determination  of  prices  by  the  interplay  of  supply  and  demand 
no  longer  applied  to  foreign  recruitment  in  the  Swiss  cantons.  Due  to  the 
behaviour  of  the  ruling  aristocracy  supply  and  demand  in  the  cantons, 

s'y  exercent  en  raison  inverse  de  ce  qui  se  passe  a  cet  egard  dans  les 
entreprises  d'industrie.  Quant  a  elles  celles-ci  font  ordinairement 
baisser  les  prix,  perfectionner  les  fournitures.  Pour  les  cantons,  car  ces 
capitulations  appartiennent  un  peu  au  domaine  des  speculations,  ils 
les  font  hausser  en  multipliant  les  pretentions  de  la  partie  qui  livre  la 
matiere  premiere  bien  qu'elle  soit  devenu  de  moindre  qualite.51 

The  common  Swiss  farmer  and  labourer,  when  offered  a  choice  between 
his  spinning  jenny  and  power  loom  or  the  uncertainties  of  service  abroad, 
preferred  to  stay  in  his  own  valley.  Napoleon's  Continental  System  had 
temporarily  cut  Switzerland  off  from  its  overseas  markets,  and  1816  and 
1817  had  seen  serious  food  shortages  and  rising  food  prices  due  to  crop 
failures.  The  ensuing  unemployment  and  poverty  had  stimulated  many 
Swiss  farmers  and  labourers  to  follow  the  Dutch  recruiting  drums.  But  after 
1817  these  incentives  subsided.  From  then  on,  the  Netherlands,  France,  and 
the  Kingdom  of  Naples  competed  in  Switzerland  for  military  manpower 
in  a  contracting  market.52  For  a  typical  canton  government,  foreign  service 
amounted  to  an  opportunity  to  get  rid  of  their  poor  and  destitute  subjects  in 

50  Van  Liedekerke  to  Verstolk  van  Soelen,  25  June  1826,  no.  132,  NA  ASS  6344;  Suter,  Inner- 
Schweizerisches  Militdrunternehmertum  im  iS.Jahrhundert. 

51  Van  Liedekerke  to  Verstolk  van  Soelen,  25  June  1826,  no.  132,  NA  ASS  6344. 

52  Maag,  Geschichte  der  Schweizertruppen  in  neapolitanischen  Diensten  7825-1861,  pp.  1-22. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


473 


the  first  instance.  The  other  side  of  this  coin  was  that,  under  the  influence 
of  the  Enlightenment,  military  service  abroad  was  now  seen  differently  in 
Switzerland.  Traditionally  it  had  been  a  honourable  occupation,  something 
to  be  proud  of.  Now  liberal  politicians  and  intellectuals  criticized  it  as  a 
social  evil  and  morally  wrong:  the  selling  of  the  skins  of  one's  citizens  to 
foreign  rulers  instead  of  caring  for  them  and  protecting  them.53  In  the  case 
of  Regiment  no.  32  it  came  as  no  surprise  to  Van  Liedekerke  that  Tessin 
had  been  a  coveted  recruiting  ground  for  Auf  der  Maur  since  this  canton, 
bordering  Italy,  was  a  traditional  hub  of  seasonal  labour.54 

In  the  face  of  this  situation,  not  very  much  could  be  done,  other  than 
accept  the  changing  structure  of  the  labour  market,  Van  Liedekerke  argued. 
The  same  advice  applied  as  far  as  the  never-ending  stream  of  requests 
for  benefits  and  advantages  from  the  governing  families  of  the  cantons 
was  concerned.  The  government  of  a  canton  and  the  families  behind  this 
government  in  1814-1816  had  been  prepared  to  conclude  capitulations  only 
because  of  the  commissions  for  their  relatives  these  contracts  entailed.  The 
military  service  in  itself  or  the  quality  of  the  troops,  let  alone  their  fighting 
power,  were  of  secondary  importance.  Clinging  to  traditional  values,  these 
families  viewed  foreign  service  as  a  means  to  provide  profitable  positions 
as  officers  for  their  offspring,  as  a  means  to  shore  up  the  resources  of  the 
family  but  above  all  as  a  means  to  buttress  their  well-respected  position, 
honour,  and  reputation  at  the  head  of  their  canton.  Their  foremost  concern 
was  keeping  up  with  the  other  governing  families  and  commanding  the 
respect  of  their  clientele  and  their  subjects.  For  them,  their  scions  serving  in 
the  Netherlands  were  part  of  their  personal  network  of  power,  like  any  other 
member  of  their  family.  Increasingly,  these  immaterial  profits  came  to  the 
foreground  and  overshadowed  the  already  diminishing  financial  returns  of 
foreign  service,  which  became  a  status  symbol  for  them  instead  of  a  way  of 
earning  a  living.55  Moreover,  in  a  traditional  state  the  distinction  between 
state  interest  and  family  interest  had  been  blurred  as  a  matter  of  course 
since  ancient  times.  Auf  der  Maur  had  stressed  this  to  the  extreme.  For  him 


53  Aellig,  DieAufhebung  der schweizerischen  Soldnerdienste  imMeinungskampfdes  neunzehten 
Jahrhunderts;  Dubler,  Der Kampfum  den  Solddienst  der  Schweizer  im  iS.Jahrhundert. 

54  Quadri  and  Lotti  to  Van  Liedekerke,  28  December  1819,  NA  Leg  Zw  19;  Van  Liedekerke  to 
Van  Nagell,  13  March  1820,  no.  180,  NA  Leg  Zw  18. 

55  See,  for  example,  Van  Liedekerke  to  Van  Nagell,  10  April  1820,  no.  184,  NA  Leg  Zw  18;  Van 
Liedekerke  to  Van  Nagell,  3  August  1820,  no.  209,  NA  Leg  Zw  18;  D'  Aubreme  to  Van  Nagell, 
9  September  1820,  La  C10  NA  MvO  GA 19;  Van  Liedekerke  to  Van  Nagell,  17  October  1820,  no.  223, 
NA  MvO  GA 19. 


474 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


Regiment  no.  32  had  been  a  cash-cow  to  provide  the  funds  he  needed  to  run 
for  the  highest  office  in  Schwyz,  that  of  Landammann. 

If,  Van  Liedekerke  warned,  the  Department  of  War  refused  to  grant  them 
the  benefits  they  expected,  these  families  would  inevitably  lose  any  interest 
in  their  regiment  whatsoever.  And  this  would  rapidly  bring  recruitment  to 
a  standstill,  as  no  Swiss  farmer  would  be  prepared  to  enlist  when  he  could 
not  follow  a  member  of  a  well-respected  family.  So  the  battle  between 
the  king  and  the  Swiss  cantons  would  terminate  "faute  de  combattans".56 
Six  years  later,  when  discussing  similar  problems  in  Regiment  no.  31,  Van 
Liedekerke  underlined  the  same  point  by  invoking  "the  authority  of  the 
facts",  as  he  phrased  it.57 

It  is  important  to  note  that  the  analysis  of  Van  Liedekerke  has  been 
confirmed  by  modern  historical  research,  not  only  for  the  years  under 
consideration  here,  but  even  for  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century.58 
However,  there  is  no  indication  whatsoever  that  the  Dutch  Department  of 
War  was  aware  of  the  changing  conditions  in  Switzerland.  As  a  consequence, 
the  dispatches  of  Van  Liedekerke  were  unpopular  in  DAubreme's  offices. 
Since  the  fall  of  the  ancien  regime  and  especially  since  the  introduction  of 
the  principles  of  modern  government  in  a  centralized,  bureaucratic  state 
over  the  years  1806-1813  this  department  had  learned  to  act  as  a  guard- 
ian of  national  interests  in  its  own  right,  under  or,  if  necessary,  even  in 
opposition  to  the  king.  The  interest  of  the  state  was,  among  other  things, 
to  dispose  of  reliable  well-trained  regiments  on  which  the  security  of  the 
state  could  depend.  Hence  the  decision  to  garrison  the  Swiss  regiments 
on  the  borders.  In  the  eyes  of  the  department  a  flawless  execution  of  the 
capitulation  was  the  cornerstone  of  Swiss  service.  Family  power  networks 


56  Van  Liedekerke  toVanNagell,  17  October  1820,  no.  223,  NADvO  GA 19.  Another  calculation, 
reaching  the  same  conclusion,  can  be  found  in  the  Koninklijke  Huisarchief  Archives  of  Prins 
Frederik  VII  b4i:  Nota  betrekkelijk  het  Regement  Zwitsers  no.  32.  The  document  is  undated  but 
the  content  indicates  that  it  was  written  in  October  1819. 

57  Van  Liedekerke  to  Verstolk  van  Soelen,  25  June  1826,  no.  132,  NA  ASS  6344.  After  having 
explained  the  nature  of  Swiss  society  and  politics  one  more  time,  Van  Liedekerke  continued 
by  arguing:  "nous  n'avons  pas  mission  pour  la  changer.  Pretendre  done  que  ces  capitulations 
vivent  et  se  soutiennnent  sur  leur  propre  fond,  e'est  vouloir  l'impossible,  elles  doivent  flechir 
devant  les  circonstances  locales  et  s'associer  surtout  aux  interets  prives  des  Magistrats  qui  ont 
de  l'influence  et  ici  on  se  permettra  d'abondonner  ses  raisonnements  pour  invoquer  l'autorite 
des  faits."  See  also  DAubreme  to  the  King,  16  February  1822,  NA  Leg  Zw  14. 

58  Suter,  Inner-Schweizerisches  Militdrunternehmertum  im  78.  Jahrhundert,  pp.  64-68;  Aeber- 
sold,  Die Militdrpolitik  des Kantons  Solothurn  in  der Restaurationszeit,  pp.  296-297;  Biihrer,  Der 
ZurcherSolddienstdes  iS.Jahrhunderts;  Kalin,  "Die  fremden  Dienste  in  gesellschaftsgeschichtli- 
cher  Perspektive". 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


475 


crossing  national  borders,  as  the  Swiss  aristocracy  deployed  them,  were  of 
no  concern  to  an  administration  that  had  to  function  within  the  limits  of 
a  modern,  territorial  state.  Swiss  officers  and  soldiers  were  no  different  to 
their  Dutch  counterparts,  with  the  exceptions  of  their  Swiss  nationality 
and  the  stipulations  of  the  capitulation.  Concluding  a  capitulation  meant 
that  the  process  of  bargaining  and  negotiations  was  over.  The  department 
refused  to  accept,  as  Van  Liedekerke  seemed  to  imply,  that  a  capitulation 
was  a  kind  of  entrance  fee  to  the  service  of  the  Netherlands,  with  bargaining 
and  negotiations  only  starting  afresh.  And  what  about  Auf  der  Maur?  In  the 
department,  scornful  and  scandalized  remarks  were  heard  of  public  money 
being  spent  on  buying  votes  in  a  faraway  Swiss  canton  instead  of  on  the 
hiring  of  good  soldiers  for  the  defence  of  the  country.59  Needless  to  say,  the 
general  was  dismissed  dishonourably  and  chased  over  the  borders  in  1820. 

But  this  was  not  enough.  Since  the  capitulations  had  been  concluded, 
the  political  and  administrative  control  of  the  Swiss  regiments  had  fallen 
to  the  Department  of  War  as  a  matter  of  routine.  Confronted  with  the 
above-mentioned  problems  the  department  began  to  inform  the  king  and 
to  exercise  influence  on  him  to  look  for  a  more  drastic  solution.  As  early 
as  March  1819  the  War  Department  calculated  that  the  average  national 
soldier  was  considerably  cheaper  (17.5  respectively  23  per  cent)  than  those 
from  Nassau  and  Switzerland,  as  is  shown  in  Table  15. 4.60 

Table  15.4  Average  cost  of  a  soldier  per  annum  (1819) 


Average  Swiss  soldier  per  annum  DFL  213.32 

Average  Nassau  soldier  per  annum  DFL  201.63 
Average  national  soldier  per  annum       DFL  164.77 

Source:  D'Aubremeto  the  King,  29  March  1819  La  Y2  NAMvO  GA  15. 

From  1820  on  it  began  considering  the  possibility  of  a  complete  dismissal 
of  all  four  regiments,  as  it  became  increasingly  evident  that  these  corps,  as 
remnants  of  the  ancien  regime,  no  longer  fitted  in  with  the  characteristics 
of  the  Dutch  state  and  its  army.  To  change  the  nature  of  the  cantonal  back- 
ground of  the  Swiss  regiments  was  beyond  the  power  of  the  Department  of 
War,  so  the  regiments  had  to  go.  At  first  the  king  showed  no  inclination  to 

59  DAubreme  to  Van  Nagell,  4  November  1820,  La  C14,  NA  MvO  GA  19;  Van  Tengnagel  to 
DAubreme,  11  Augusti825,  no.  20,  NAMvO  GA  30;  Van  Tengnagell  to  DAubreme,  nAugusti825, 
no.  19,  NA  MvO  GA  30. 

60  DAubreme  to  the  King,  29  March  1819,  La  Y2,  NA  MvO  GA  15. 


476 


HERMAN  AMERSFOORT 


follow  the  argument  of  the  department.  But  over  the  years  he  was  losing 
ground.  In  the  first  place  the  Standing  Army,  of  which  the  Swiss  regiments 
had  been  an  integral  part,  in  fact  had  ceased  to  exist  since  the  amalgame. 
Now  the  army  relied  on  conscripts  to  fill  its  ranks.  In  the  second  place, 
liberal  representatives  in  parliament,  especially  those  from  the  Southern 
Netherlands,  began  to  object  to  the  presence  of  the  four  corps.  They  also 
were  aware  that  these  corps  were  far  more  expensive  than  normal  Dutch 
regiments,  made  up  of  conscripts.  Moreover,  they  saw  them  as  the  symbols  of 
the  very  royal  prerogative  those  liberals  objected  to.61  So  in  the  end  the  king 
had  to  give  in,  to  save  his  already  threatened  kingdom.  In  1829,  after  difficult 
negotiations,  doing  ample  honour  to  the  reputation  of  the  Swiss  as  hard 
bargainers,  the  capitulations  were  denounced,  the  regiments  disbanded, 
officers,  NCOs  and  soldiers  dismissed  and  sent  home.  To  demonstrate  that 
different  times  had  arrived  indeed,  they  were  replaced  by  three  national 
regiments,  saving  300,000  Dutch  guilders  on  a  yearly  basis.62 

Conclusion 

Although  at  first  sight  the  birth  of  the  Dutch  cadre-militia  army  and  the 
sorry  fate  of  the  Swiss  regiments  are  quite  different  stories,  they  bear  a  strik- 
ing resemblance.  In  the  end  they  both  underline  that  the  Netherlands  in 
the  1795-1830  period  went  through  a  systemic  change  as  far  as  the  army  was 
concerned.  Both  stories  can  be  seen  as  a  clash  between  the  traditionality 
of  the  ancien  regime  and  the  modernity  of  the  centralized,  bureaucratic, 
territorial  state:  the  former  losing  and  the  latter  winning.  The  state  wanted 
to  have  direct  access  to  the  manpower  contained  in  its  domestic  population 
and  no  longer  wanted  to  deal  with  a  labour  market  that  was  in  the  hands 
of  a  aristocratic  elite  at  home  or  abroad,  especially  if  the  foreign  elite  tried 
to  extend  its  patronage  networks  across  the  borders  of  the  Netherlands.  In 
this  process  the  age-old  all-volunteer  force  of  the  ancien  regime  disappeared 
from  the  scene  to  be  superseded  by  a  cadre-militia  army 

Now  the  question  that  needs  to  be  answered  is  this:  what  were  the  driving 
forces  propelling  this  profound  transformation  as  far  as  the  Netherlands 
are  concerned?  The  first  and  foremost  driving  forces  were  the  changing 

61  Amersfoort,  Koning  en  Kanton,  pp.  227-276. 

62  This  is  my  own  calculation;  see  ibid.,  pp.  262-265.  These  cuts  were  soon  overshadowed  in 
the  budget  by  the  extra  high  expenditures  as  of  1830  as  a  result  of  the  Belgian  secession  and  the 
drastic  reorganization  of  the  army  and  its  mobilization  up  to  1839. 


THE  DUTCH  ARMY  IN  TRANSITION 


477 


conditions  on  the  Dutch,  German,  and  Swiss  labour  markets  in  the  second 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The  Dutch  labour  market  was  too  small 
to  provide  for  the  numbers  of  volunteers  the  army  needed.  Traditionally 
these  shortages  had  been  met  by  foreign  recruitment.  However,  due  to  the 
combined  effects  of  booming  agriculture  and  industry,  restrictive  measures 
by  the  Prussian  and  Austrian  authorities  and  the  introduction  of  conscrip- 
tion in  many  German  states,  these  foreign  labour  markets  gradually  dried 
up.  On  top  of  that,  liberals  in  the  Netherlands,  Germany,  and  Switzerland 
opposed  to  foreign  recruitment  and  the  all-volunteer  force  argued  that 
the  security  of  the  state  was  the  concern  of  every  individual  citizen  and 
that  military  service  as  a  conscript  was  a  national  duty.  In  their  opinion 
the  Standing  Army  was  an  oppressive  instrument  of  royal  power  that  had 
to  be  curbed  by  the  countervailing  power  of  the  militia.  These  already 
powerful  forces  coincided  with  the  exigencies  of  Napoleonic  warfare  and 
the  ensuing  revolutionary  growth  in  army  size.  The  new  Dutch  sovereign 
William  Frederick  from  1814  onwards  readily  followed  this  trend.  The 
special  relationship  with  Britain  as  well  as  his  own  ambitions  to  restore 
the  Netherlands  as  a  power  of  the  middle  rank  or  even  the  first  rank  pointed 
in  the  same  direction:  an  army  of  substantial  strength.  Events  would  soon 
prove  that  this  army  increasingly  had  to  rely  on  conscripts. 

Over  the  years  1813-1830  these  driving  forces  manifested  themselves 
in  three  simultaneous  conflicts.  In  the  first  dispute,  the  one  between  the 
king  and  the  Second  Chamber,  control  over  the  army  and  over  its  financing 
were  at  stake.  The  second  controversy  between  the  Department  of  War 
and  the  Swiss  cantons  centred  upon  the  question  of  whether  the  army  was 
purely  an  instrument  of  the  modern,  bureaucratic,  territorial  unitary  state 
or  whether  the  private  interests  of  foreign  aristocratic  families  and  their 
internal  rivalries  should  be  allowed  to  interfere  with  the  administration 
and  control  of  the  army.  The  third  conflict  between  the  king  and  his  own 
Ministry  of  War  was  about  the  question  of  whether  the  public  service  would 
be  able  to  develop  itself  into  an  autonomous  keeper  of  the  national  interests, 
independent  of  the  court.  Taken  together,  these  driving  forces  and  conflicts 
explain  the  profound  transformation  the  Dutch  army  underwent  in  the 
decades  between  1795  and  1830. 


The  draft  and  draftees  in  Italy,  1861-1914 

Marco  Rovinello 

According  to  the  Oxford  English  Dictionary,  conscription  is  "compulsory  en- 
listment for  state  service,  typically  into  the  armed  forces",  while  a  conscript 
and  a  volunteer  are  respectively  "a  person  enlisted  compulsorily"  and  "a  per- 
son who  freely  enrolls  for  military  service  rather  than  being  conscripted".1 
Seemingly  straightforward  terms  like  these  become,  however,  much  trickier 
in  the  eye  of  the  historian,  who  is  always  striving  to  historicize  and  compare 
apparently  ubiquitous  taxonomies  and  phenomena. 

This  chapter  faces  both  challenges  starting  from  the  nineteenth-century 
Italian  conscription  experience.  It  will  briefly  analyze  the  draft  system  of 
pre-unification  states,  and  then  will  reconstruct  the  evolution  of  Italian 
recruitment  laws  and  practices  from  La  Marmora's  draft  act  (1854)  to  the  eve 
of  World  War  I.  On  the  one  hand,  attention  will  be  paid  to  the  supposed  shift 
from  a  professional-dynastic  militia  toward  a  draft-based  army,  in  order  to 
verify  its  linearity  and  the  universality  of  Italian  conscription.  The  chapter 
will  show  in  particular  how  much  the  draft  changed  according  to  current 
political  concerns  and  internal  security  needs.  At  the  same  time,  it  will 
highlight  some  constants  in  Italian  conscription,  such  as  the  discriminatory 
nature  of  the  system  and  the  government's  ambiguous  attitude  toward 
draftees.  On  the  other  hand,  the  chapter  will  approach  military  service  in 
terms  of  labor  relations  between  the  army  and  reenlisted  people.  From  this 
perspective,  it  will  investigate  who  opted  for  soldiering  as  a  form  of  employ- 
ment and  why,  while  trying  to  establish  to  what  extent  forced/voluntary 
and  commodified/noncommodified  military  labor  can  be  identified  and 
disaggregated  in  the  experience  of  nineteenth-century  Italian  soldiers. 

A  nation-state  in  progress:  the  long  road  to  unification  1814-1858 

Although  most  pre-unification  Italian  states  relied  on  semiprofessional 
dynastic  militias  and  mercenary  troops,  the  postunification  draft  did  not 
start  from  scratch,  and  its  history  is  inseparably  linked  to  that  of  the  previ- 
ous recruitment  systems  in  force  on  the  peninsula. 


1     See  http://oxforddictionaries.com  (accessed  23  March  2011). 


480 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


Starting  in  1815,  roughly  30,000  Italian-speaking  subjects  from  Lombardy 
and  Venetia  were  recruited  yearly  into  the  Habsburg  army  (8.5-10  per  cent 
of  the  peacetime  force),  and  normally  served  for  eight  years  in  Italian  gar- 
risons.2 In  the  Duchies  of  Modena  and  Parma,  the  law  stated  that  young 
men  were  obligated  to  fulfill  their  military  service  in  person.  In  practice, 
however,  the  armies  were  composed  primarily  of  volunteers  and  substitutes 
-  namely,  men  paid  to  replace  draftees  in  the  service.3 

Leopold  II's  Tuscany  conscription  also  theoretically  involved  every  male 
subject,  but  in  practice  most  youngsters  were  exempted  and  the  limited 
needs  of  the  army  were  easily  fulfilled  by  volunteers.4  In  the  Papal  States 
one-third  of  the  army  consisted  of  two  Swiss  mercenary  regiments,  and 
the  rest  of  the  annual  contingent  (10,000  men  in  1816-1831,  about  7,500  in 
1852-1859)  was  raised  through  volunteerism  and  reenlisting,  even  if  military 
service  had  been  nominally  compulsory  and  universal  since  1822.5  After  its 
temporary  abolition  in  the  first  stages  of  the  restoration,  the  draft  worked  in 
the  continental  part  of  the  Kingdom  of  the  Two  Sicilies  too.  However,  as  only 
10-20  per  cent  of  the  eligible  men  from  each  class  were  actually  recruited, 
the  annual  contingent  was  small  (8,000  men  until  1848, 12,000  between 
1849  and  1858,  and  18,000  after  1858)  and  mostly  composed  of  volunteers, 
since  the  Bourbons  also  employed  four  regiments  of  Swiss  mercenaries 
(altogether  6,000-8,000  men)  and  the  1834  conscription  law  excluded  a  good 
twenty-two  exempted  categories.6 

Therefore,  almost  all  pre-unification  Italian  regimes  kept  the  draft  alive 
on  paper,  but  in  practice  preferred  to  limit  recruitment  to  a  small  percentage 
of  their  populations,  mostly  chosen  from  among  the  classes  dangereuses. 
This  happened  for  the  same  reasons  explored  by  Thomas  Hippler  in  the 
case  of  France:  from  the  perspective  of  the  restored  sovereigns,  universal 
conscription  still  looked  like  both  a  dangerous  revolutionary  heritage  and 
a  very  expensive  way  to  set  up  their  militias.7.  Moreover,  no  Italian  state 
was  a  first-rank  power,  in  need  of  an  army  large  enough  to  back  its  foreign 


2  Sondhaus,  In  the  Service  of  the  Emperor. 

3  Zannoni  and  Fiorentino,  Le  Reali  Truppe  Parmensi. 

4  Giorgetti,  Le  armi  toscane  e  le  occupazioni  militari  in  Toscana. 

5  Biagini,  "La  riorganizzazione  dell'esercito  pontificio  e  gli  arruolamenti  in  Umbria". 

6  Fiorentino  and  Boeri,  L'esercito  delle  Due  Sicilie;  Battaglini,  L'organizzazione  militare  del 
Regno  delle  Dite  Sicilie.  On  the  Napoleonic  era,  see  Ilari,  Crociani  and  Boeri,  Storia  militare  del 
regno  murattiano.  On  the  Swiss  mercenaries,  see  Maag,  Geschichte  der  Schweizertruppen  in 
neapolitanischen  Diensten. 

7  Hippler,  "Conscription  in  the  French  Restoration". 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


481 


policy;  Italian  states  were  not  equipped  to  handle  even  internal  troubles,  as 
the  revolutions  in  1820-1821, 1830,  and  1848-1849  would  clearly  demonstrate. 

The  only  country  with  a  real  desire  to  play  a  major  role  in  the  postrevo- 
lutionary  European  balance  of  power,  and  to  leading  the  Italian  unification 
process,  was  the  Kingdom  of  Sardinia.  Thus,  Piedmontese  conscription 
history  followed  a  very  different  pattern  to  those  of  the  other  states.  Vittorio 
Emanuele  I  had  abolished  conscription  immediately  after  regaining  the 
throne  in  1814.  However,  the  unexpected  outbreak  of  the  War  of  the  Seventh 
Coalition  and  the  subsequent  urgent  need  for  men  led  the  king  to  reintro- 
duce a  slightly  modified  draft  system  which  mixed  the  French  and  the 
Prussian  models,  and  essentially  relied  upon  professional  soldiers  integrated 
with  a  very  small  call-up  contingent.  This  hybrid  solution  remained  in  place 
until  the  1830s,  when  Carlo  Alberto  modified  it  extensively  in  order  to  face 
the  Habsburgs  on  the  Lombard  border  with  around  100,000  men.  Therefore, 
the  new  system  was  expected  to  be  a  "perfected  version  of  the  Prussian 
one"8  with  part  of  the  army  composed  of  volunteers  or  substitutes  and  the 
other  portion  raised  through  one-year  long  compulsory  service  followed  by 
periodic  training  camps  in  the  seven  years  that  followed.9 

Although  the  new  system  involved  no  more  than  25  per  cent  of  those 
who  were  technically  eligible,  and  provided,  wealthy  citizens  with  several 
ways  to  escape  enlistment,  conscription  faced  serious  resistance:  volunteers 
were  fewer  than  in  the  Napoleon  era,  and  many  youngsters  tried  to  escape 
enlistment  by  deserting,  simulating  disease,  self-mutilating,  and  corrupt- 
ing the  local  civil  servants  who  made  the  conscription  lists.  The  Savoy 
government,  whose  "infrastructural  development"  had  not  yet  enabled  it 
to  effectively  compel  citizens  to  fulfill  their  duties,10  had  to  compromise  by 
drastically  reducing  the  annual  contingent,  but  it  refused  to  eliminate  the 
draft  completely.  In  this  way,  Carlo  Alberto's  army  was  weakened  -  and 
would  be  defeated  by  the  Habsburg  forces  in  1848  -  but  an  important  goal 
had  been  achieved:  both  Piedmont  subjects  and  military  authorities  had 
already  become  familiar  with  conscription.11 


8  Pieri,  Storia  militare  del Risorgimento,  p.  171. 

9  Ales,  L'armata  sarda  e  le  riforme  albertine. 

10  I  borrow  this  concept  from  Weiss,  "Infrastructural  Power,  Economic  Transformation,  and 
Globalization". 

11  Pischedda,  Esercito  e  societd  in  Piemonte. 


482 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


The  Piedmontese-Italian  case:  some  essentials  about  conscription 
laws  and  army  features  before  and  after  unification 

When  in  the  1850s  the  new  minister  of  war  -  General  Alfonso  La  Marmora 
-  was  asked  to  reorganize  the  armed  forces,  the  parliamentary  debate 
on  the  military  reform  was  substantive.  However,  the  distance  between 
the  backers  of  the  "the  army  of  quality"  and  the  supporters  of  "the  army 
of  quantity"  had  been  much  reduced  in  comparison  to  the  past.  Both  the 
majority  and  the  minority  agreed  on  the  necessity  of  considerably  enlarging 
the  peacetime  contingent,  both  supported  the  extension  of  service  time  at 
least  up  to  three  years,  and  it  is  significant  that  no  one  -  not  even  the  most 
traditionalist  faction  -  called  for  the  abolition  of  conscription  and  for  the 
reintroduction  of  the  prerevolutionary  all-volunteer  army.12  Nearly  forty 
years  of  the  draft  represented  a  shared  background  among  the  Piedmontese 
ruling  class. 

La  Marmora's  draft  system  of  1854  adapted  its  guidelines  from  the 
French  recruitment  law  of  1818, 13  with  the  aim  of  correcting  the  weaknesses 
demonstrated  by  the  previous  German-style  system  in  1848.  In  theory,  the 
Piedmont  peacetime  army  (50,000  men)  was  mostly  composed  of  career 
soldiers  who  had  started  as  volunteers.  If  not  enough  men  volunteered  to  fill 
the  annual  contingent  determined  by  the  government  (about  9,000-10,000 
men),  twenty-year-old  male  subjects  were  drafted  into  a  two-tiered  system, 
through  a  lottery.  Men  who  picked  "bad  numbers"  were  enlisted  into  the  first 
category  and  had  to  serve  actively  for  five  years.  Those  who  picked  "good 
numbers"  were  enrolled  under  the  second  category  and  received  periodic 
basic  training  over  forty  to  fifty  days,  but  they  were  allowed  get  married 
and  entered  active  service  only  in  times  of  war. 

In  practice,  75  per  cent  of  the  peacetime  army  was  composed  of  draftees 
because  of  the  lack  of  volunteers.  Moreover,  most  conscripts  came  from 
the  poorest  classes14  because  of  the  extensive  system  of  familial  and  reli- 
gious exemptions,  and  because  the  upper  classes  could  -  in  practice  -  buy 
themselves  out  of  their  obligations.  At  least  forty-six  articles  detailed  "how 

12  The  debate  is  reconstructed  by  Pieri,  Leforze  armate  nella  eta  della  Destra,  and  Del  Negro, 
"Garibaldi  tra  esercito  regio  e  nazione  armata". 

13  On  French  conscription  laws,  see  Crepin,  Defendre  laFrance.  In  contrast,  Ilari  has  asserted 
that  La  Marmora's  model  was  the  Prussian  post-1848  system:  Ilari,  Storia  delservizio  mUitare  in 
Italia,  I,  p.  333.  On  Prussian  recruitment  practices,  see  Craig,  The  Politics  of  the  Prussian  Army. 

14  The  contingent  recruited  in  i860  from  the  former  Piedmontese  territories  was  composed 
mainly  of  peasants  (54  per  cent)  and  herdsmen  (in  charge  of  cattle)  (16  per  cent),  while  landown- 
ers were  only  1  per  cent.  See  Torre,  Relazione  sulle  leve  eseguite  in  Italia,  pp.  89-91. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


483 


enlisted  people  can  be  exonerated  from  the  service".  Realistically,  the  sons 
of  the  richest  bourgeoisie  had  two  ways  of  legally  escaping  enlistment.  The 
first  was  substitution  (surrogazione)  -  namely,  finding  a  substitute  who 
would  voluntarily  complete  the  service  on  behalf  of  the  draftee.  The  second 
was  liberation  (Liber azione/ajfrancamento)  -  that  is,  paying  a  higher  sum 
directly  to  the  state  in  order  to  gain  exemption,  and  then  letting  military 
authorities  find  a  substitute. 

Substitution  could  involve  either  brothers  (surrogazione  tra  fratelli)  or 
unrelated  people  (surrogazione  ordinaria),  and  the  requirements  for  the 
substitute  were  more  or  less  the  same:  Italian  citizenship,  a  clean  record, 
age  eighteen  to  twenty-six,  being  physically  fit  and  unmarried  or  widower 
with  no  children.15  The  most  important  difference  between  those  two  types 
of  replacement  was  that  the  first  was  free,  while  the  latter  cost  700  L.  until 
1862,  and  1,200  L.  thereafter.  This  difference  stemmed  from  the  Piedmont 
government's  acceptance  of  Hegel's  idea  that  family  -  not  the  individual  - 
was  the  smallest  component  of  society.  Therefore,  at  least  in  theory,  each 
family  had  to  offer  the  fatherland  one  of  its  members. 

Liberation  was  much  more  expensive.  The  fee  was  fixed  each  year  by  a 
royal  decree,  but  it  always  cost  nearly  three  times  substitution  -  3,100  L.  in 
1861, 3,200  L.  in  1863,  and  4,200  L.  in  1866,  as  the  war  against  the  Habsburgs 
was  breaking  out.  It  was  a  huge  sum  with  respect  to  the  average  Italian's 
income  in  the  1860s  and  to  the  liberation  fees  paid  elsewhere.16  Nevertheless, 
many  men  were  able  to  buy  their  freedom  before  the  official  unification, 
and  even  more  so  afterwards  (see  Table  16.1),  when  Piedmont  conscription 
law  was  extended  to  include  the  whole  national  territory.  As  the  number 
of  applications  overwhelmed  the  number  of  available  volunteers  by  a  large 
margin,  the  government  had  to  reject  most  applications.  Otherwise,  in  1864 
nearly  20  per  cent  of  the  first-category  conscripts  would  have  managed  to 
legally  escape  military  service.  The  percentage  of  liberated  draftees  was 
even  higher  after  1866,  when  a  new  law  allowed  conscripts  to  be  liberated 

15  The  main  difference  was  that  an  unrelated  substitute  should  be  at  least  i.6om  tall,  whereas 
a  brother  substitute  had  no  minimum  height  and  also  could  replace  the  conscript  after  his 
enrollment.  See  Recruitment  law  n.  1676, 20  March  1854,  articles  130-145.  All  Italian  recruitment 
laws  are  available  in  Raccolta  ufficiale  delle  leggi  e  del  decreti  del  Regno  d'ltalia,  which  was 
published  annually  by  Stamperia  Reale  in  Turin. 

16  The  average  annual  salary  in  1860s  Italy  was  about  300  L.  See  Rosselli,  Mazzini  e  Bakunin, 
pp.  10-18.  Under  Napoleon  III  the  exoneration  fee  amounted  to  2,000-2,500  francs  (Kovacs, 
"French  Military  Institutions  before  the  Franco-Prussian  War",  p.  222),  that  is,  an  average  of 
2,430  L.,  according  to  the  1866  exchange  rate  suggested  by  Frattianni  and  Spinelli,  "Italy  in  the 
Gold  Standard  Period". 


484 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


through  the  payment  of  fees  even  in  the  absence  of  enough  volunteers.  To 
complicate  things  further,  the  government  did  not  simply  tolerate  this  prac- 
tice; it  actually  encouraged  liberation  for  both  economic  and  disciplinary 
reasons.  In  fact,  the  liberation  fee  supplied  the  army  budget  with  precious 
extra  income  (see  Table  16. 2). 17  This  income  enabled  military  authorities  to 
employ  fit  and  well-trained  men  by  granting  an  extra  monthly  sum  (sopras- 
soldo)  to  the  most  disciplined  conscripts  already  serving  under  the  colors 
(ajfidatianziani)  instead  of  enrolling  the  substitutes  provided  by  draftees, 
about  whom  complains  of  low  quality  were  often  voiced  by  officers.18 


Table  16.1  Liberations  in  the  Italian  army  in  the  1860s 


Year 

Annual  contingent 

Liberations 

% 

1863 

45,000 

1,030 

2.29% 

1864 

55,000 

2,254 

4.10% 

1865 

46,000 

1,936 

4.21% 

1866 

51,000 

2,592 

5.08% 

1867* 

40,000 

1,009 

2.52% 

1868** 

1869*** 

40,000 

1,500 

3.75% 

Source:  Substitution  and  liberation  data  were  published  annually  in  Torre's  reports.  See  Torre,  Delia 
leva  sul  giovani  natl  nell'anno  (1 864-1 870). 

Notes: 

*  From  1867,  data  include  also  recruits  from  Venetia. 

**  Conscripts  born  in  1847  were  drafted  one  year  late  for  economic  reasons. 
*** Therefore  1869  data  concern  conscripts  born  in  1847  and  1848. 


17  The  annual  expenses  of  the  Ministry  of  War  are  reported  in  Rochat  and  Massobrio,  Breve 
storia  dell'esercito  italiano  dal  1861  al  1945,  pp.  67-68.  The  role  of  exemption  and  replacement 
fees  in  the  army's  balance  was  a  largely  shared  feature  of  the  European  nineteenth-century 
recruitment  systems  and  a  major  factor  in  preventing  governments  from  eliminating  socially 
based  discriminations  from  the  draft.  On  France,  see  Schnapper,  Le  remplacement  militaire  en 
France;  on  the  Ottoman  Empire,  see  Ziircher,  "The  Ottoman  Conscription  System  in  Theory  and 
Practice". 

18  Even  La  Marmora  complained  about  this  drawback  of  his  draft  system.  See  Ilari,  Storia  del 
servizio  militare  in  Italia,  I,  p.  345. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914  485 


Table  16.2  The  liberation  fee  and  the  Ministry  of  War's  balance  (in  millions  of  lira) 


Income  from 

Ministry  of  War 

Year 

liberations 

expenses 

% 

1863 

3,296 

252,500 

1.3% 

1864 

9,110.4 

256,000 

3.6% 

1865 

6,195.2 

192,700 

3.2% 

1866 

8,294.4 

510,800 

1.6% 

1867* 

3,228.8 

145,000 

2.2% 

1868** 

1869*** 

6,889.6 

149,500 

4.6% 

Source:  Torre,  Delia  leva  sui  giovanl  nati  nell'anno  (1 864-1 870). 
Notes: 

*  From  1867,  data  include  fees  paid  by  Venetian  draftees. 

**  Conscripts  born  in  1847  were  drafted  one  year  late  for  economic  reasons. 

♦*»  Therefore,  1869  data  concern  conscripts  born  in  1847  and  1848. 


Moreover,  substitution  and  liberation  were  common  institutions  in 
nineteenth-century  European  armies.19  Therefore,  La  Marmora  had  to 
face  very  little  resistance  when  he  submitted  his  reform  to  the  Piedmont 
parliament.  More  criticisms  arose  after  unification,  when  many  officers 
and  civilian  observers  accused  the  government  of  enabling  its  fittest  and 
most  educated  citizens  to  refuse  "the  holiest  duty,  serving  and  defending 
the  fatherland".20  Many  pamphlets  described  liberation  as  the  most  evident 
signal  of  the  bourgeoisie's  indifference  to  the  destiny  of  the  state  and  the  na- 
tion. Conversely,  some  officers  stressed  that  "draft  fills  the  gaps  in  the  army 
only  through  the  poorest  classes".21  However,  these  complaints  were  not 
sufficient  to  induce  the  Ministry  of  War  to  question  one  of  the  cornerstones 
of  Piedmontese-Italian  military  organization. 

The  continuity  in  the  recruitment  law  unquestionably  contributed  to  the 
stability  of  the  army  structure  and  social  composition  in  the  crucial  transi- 
tion from  the  pre-unification  militias  to  the  national  army.  Naturally,  the 
new  Italian  army  was  much  larger  than  the  Savoy  one  (about  200,000  men), 
but  the  militarization  rate  was  more  or  less  the  same:  generally  speaking, 

19  In  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  replacement  and/or  liberation  were  in  force  at 
least  in  Napoleon  Ill's  France,  in  post-1840  Belgium,  in  Saxony,  Baden  and  Wiirttemberg,  and 
in  the  tsarist,  Ottoman  and  Habsburg  Empires,  as  well  as  in  most  Italian  pre-unification  states. 

20  Errani,  Re  e  patria,  p.  47. 

21  Miaglia,  Sull'ordinamento  delleforze  militari  del  Regno  d'ltalia,  p.  211.  See  also  Marselli,  GU 
avvenimenti  del  7870,  and  Monti,  Osservazioni  sulla  legge  7  luglio  7866. 


486 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


it  was  slightly  lower  (one  recruit  out  of  every  three  twenty-year-old  men), 
but  it  was  slightly  higher  (one  out  of  five)  if  we  consider  men  enlisted  in 
the  first  category  only.22  The  army's  enlargement  had  no  effect  upon  its 
sociological  composition:  most  recruits  still  were  peasants  and  shepherds, 
whereas  landowners,  students,  doctors,  and  lawyers  together  composed 
5.5  per  cent  of  the  contingent  raised  between  1863  and  1869  (see  Table  16.3). 


Table  16.3  Italian  draftees'  professions  (1863-1869) 


Profession 

Number  of 
draftees 

70 

Peasants /shepherds 

282,471 

56.1% 

Herdsmen  (in  charge  of  cattle) 

33,867 

6.7% 

Porters 

28,677 

5.7% 

Craftsmen 

25,864 

5.1% 

Bricklayers 

24,324 

4.8% 

Tanners 

17,340 

3.4% 

Students  /  lawyers  /  civil  servants 

14,938 

3.0% 

Joiners 

14,805 

2.9% 

Tavern-keepers  /food  sellers  /  bartenders 

13,537 

2.7% 

Blacksmiths 

11,384 

2.3% 

Landowners 

10,942 

2.2% 

Shopkeepers 

8,622 

1.7% 

Servants 

7,188 

1.4% 

Fishermen 

3,306 

0.7% 

Artists 

2,524 

0.5% 

Jewelers 

1,461 

0.3% 

Veterinarians  /  farriers 

1,141 

0.2% 

Doctors 

1,062 

0.2% 

Total 

503,453 

100.0% 

Source:  The  data  concerning  the  professional  status  of  the  1860s  recuits  are  synthetically  reported 
in  Torre,  Delia  leva  sui  giovani  nati  nell'anno  1870,  pp.  82-83. 


As  Bruce  Porter  has  pointed  out,  the  outcome  of  wars  always  affects  military 
systems,  of  both  winners  and  losers.23  Therefore,  it  is  not  surprising  that 
the  1866  defeat  represented  the  first  important  turning  point  in  Italian 

22  In  1861,  there  were  about  25  million  Italians,  more  or  less  five  times  the  number  of  the 
subjects  of  the  King  of  Sardinia  in  1859:  Ilari,  Storia  del  servizio  militare  in  Italia,  I,  p.  368. 

23  Porter,  War  and  the  Rise  of  the  State. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


487 


conscription  history.  The  disappointing  performance  on  the  battlefield 
along  with  the  evident  limits  of  mass  nationalization  led  several  observers 
to  criticize  the  entire  military  organization.24  Most  military  experts  claimed 
that  the  Prussians'  crushing  victory  over  the  Habsburg  forces  (1866)  had 
shown  the  superiority  of  the  "army  of  quantity"  over  the  out-of-date  French- 
style  semiprofessional  army.  On  the  other  hand,  civilian  critics  stressed 
that  La  Marmora's  draft  had  not  significantly  contributed  to  the  creation 
of  a  solid  Italian  national  identity. 

While  few  dared  to  defend  the  status  quo  publicly,  the  debate  did  not 
rapidly  lead  to  a  new  arrangement.  This  was  due  to  the  clash  between  the 
two  major  schools  of  thought  and  the  challenges  the  government  still  had 
to  face  in  order  to  complete  the  unification  process  and  bring  the  whole 
territory  under  the  control  of  the  central  power.  It  is  no  coincidence  that 
parliamentary  discussion  about  conscription  reform  started  in  December 
1870,25  after  Rome  had  fallen  and  the  Prussian  victory  at  Sedan  had  swept 
away  all  remaining  doubts  about  the  German  model's  efficiency.  Actually, 
the  proposal  made  by  the  new  minister  of  war,  General  Cesare  Ricotti 
Magnani,26  was  largely  inspired  by  the  German  draft  system,  not  only  from 
a  technical  viewpoint  but,  more  generally,  also  regarding  the  tasks  that  the 
army  was  expected  to  perform.27  At  the  international  level,  after  French 
power  had  been  scaled  down,  Italy  wished  to  be  recognized  as  a  middle-  to 
high-ranking  power;  therefore,  the  army  was  required  to  back  this  new  for- 
eign policy  objective,  mostly  through  an  increase  in  the  annual  contingent. 

On  the  internal  level,  once  "Italy  was  made",  the  army  had  to  cooper- 
ate more  actively  with  the  other  nationalization  agencies  in  "making  the 
Italians"  and,  simultaneously,  in  keeping  the  political  claims  of  the  lower 
classes  under  control. 

Therefore,  it  is  not  surprising  that  Ricotti's  reform  (which  actually 
consisted  of  several  acts  promulgated  between  1870  and  1875)  not  only 
increased  the  number  of  men  recruited  yearly  in  the  first  category  (from 

24  See  for  example  Villari,  "Di  chi  e  la  colpa?"  The  concrete  result  of  the  army's  nationalization 
effort  is  still  under  question.  Among  those  who  tend  to  underestimate  it,  see  Del  Negro,  "L'esercito 
italiano  da  Napoleone  a  Vittorio  Veneto".  More  optimistic  is  Mondini,  "La  nazione  di  Marte". 

25  For  a  detailed  reconstruction  of  the  parliamentary  debate,  see  Ilari,  Storia  del  servizio 
militare  in  Italia,  II,  pp.  115-128. 

26  On  Ricotti  as  minister  of  war,  see  Berger  Waldenegg,  "II  ministro  della  guerra  Cesare  Ricotti 
e  la  politica  delle  riforme  militari",  and  Labanca,  II  generate  Cesare  Ricotti  e  la  politica  militare 
italiana. 

27  The  same  attitude  toward  the  German  system  characterized  the  1872  French  recruitment 
law.  On  the  general  awe  of  the  German  system  on  the  part  of  the  French  military  establishment, 
see  Digeon,  la  crise  allemande  de  la  penseefrancaise. 


488 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


40,000  to  65,000)  and  reduced  to  three  years  (four  for  cavalry)  of  active 
service  time,28  but  also  radically  changed  the  concept  of  military  service 
itself:  serving  evolved  from  a  general  responsibility,  to  be  fulfilled  only 
by  those  who  were  enrolled,29  to  a  "personal  duty"  everyone  had  to  fulfill 
themselves.30  The  percentage  of  men  recruited  in  the  first  category  rose 
from  17  per  cent  (1870)  to  25  per  cent  in  the  early  1870s  and  those  who  were 
enlisted  in  the  second  category  were  forced  to  train  periodically  anyway, 
thanks  to  "good  numbers".31 

Additionally,  if  the  army  was  to  be  "the  true  school  of  the  Nation"  as  the 
new  discipline  regulations  stated,32  keeping  the  sons  of  the  elite  outside  of  it 
no  longer  made  sense,  especially  after  the  Paris  Commune  had  shown  how 
dangerous  it  was  for  the  social  order  to  rely  on  an  army  almost  exclusively 
composed  of  proletarians.  Therefore,  Ricotti  abolished  both  replacement 
and  liberation.  This  decision  generated  fierce  protest.  Both  bourgeois  and 
Catholic  forces  launched  powerful  and  harsh  media  campaigns  against 
Ricotti.  Additionally,  many  old-fashioned  officers  commented  ironically 
on  the  pedagogical  task  assigned  to  the  military  institution  and  strongly 
stressed  the  negative  influence  of  enlisting  undisciplined  seminarians  and 
bourgeoisie  on  the  discipline  of  the  rank  and  file.33 

However,  the  Italian  conscription  system  was  still  far  from  egalitarian, 
despite  the  fears  of  the  upper  classes  and  officers.  As  in  France,  substitution 
and  liberation  were  replaced  by  an  adapted  version  of  the  German  "one-year 
volunteerism",  which  allowed  students  and  some  other  eligible  parties  to 
pay  a  sum  (about  1,500  L.)  to  avoid  some  of  the  most  unpleasant  aspects  of 
military  service.  In  fact,  one-year  volunteers  could  delay  their  enrollment 
until  they  were  twenty-seven,  serve  for  a  single  year  in  the  regiment  of 
their  choice,  and  then  be  promoted  to  officer  after  discharge  by  passing 
an  easy  exam. 

Officially,  one-year  volunteerism  had  two  major  goals:  first,  it  was 
thought  to  be  the  best  way  to  involve  the  bourgeoisie  without  angering 

28  Nominally,  service  time  was  three  years.  Nevertheless,  the  minister  was  allowed  to  discharge 
old  classes  in  advance,  and  he  usually  discharged  them  after  thirty  to  thirty-two  months  of 
active  service. 

29  Recruitment  law  n.  1676,  20  March  1854,  article  4. 

30  Law  n.  2532,  7  June  1875,  article  1. 

31  Ilari,  Storia  del  servizio  militare  in  Italia,  II,  p.  213. 

32  Ministero  della  Guerra,  Regolamento  di  disciplina  militare  del  7.  dicembre,  article  8,  §  33.  The 
regulations  represented  another  key  issue  of  the  reform.  See  Rovinello,  '"Giuro  di  essere  fedele 
al  Re  ed  a'  suoi  reali  successori'". 

33  La  Marmora,  Quattro  discorsi  del  generate  Alfonso  La  Marmora. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


489 


them,  and  thus  ensure  the  army  of  a  sufficient  number  of  skilled  auxiliary 
officers.  Secondly,  the  fees  of  one-year  volunteers  were  supposed  to  replace 
the  liberation  and  substitution  fees  in  the  Ministry  ofWar's  depleted  coffers. 
Both  of  these  attempts  failed  dismally.  The  high  fees  and  other  factors 
discouraged  many  youngsters  from  applying  for  one-year  volunteerism. 
Consequently,  from  1875  onwards,  the  number  of  one-year  volunteers  was 
70-80  per  cent  lower  than  the  government  had  predicted  (about  1,000-1,500 
a  year,  instead  of  5,000)  and  the  average  income  for  the  state  dropped  from 
about  7,000,000  L.  to  about  1,750,000  L.34  Simultaneously,  one-year  volunteer- 
ism did  not  make  military  life  any  more  appealing;  on  the  contrary,  it  rapidly 
became  a  way  for  the  richest  classes  to  escape  service  by  exploiting  this 
"heritage  of  an  ancient  and  hateful  privilege".35 

The  Italian  bourgeoisie  was  very  different  from  the  German  one.3*5  Most 
well-educated  young  men  from  good  families  aspired  to  join  the  liberal 
professions  and  had  little  interest  in  the  military  as  a  career.  As  General 
Emilio  De  Bono  wrote,  "It  is  well  known  that  to  become  a  one-year  volunteer 
the  first  requirement  was  not  to  wish  to  be  a  soldier  [...]  and  three  months 
spent  in  regiments  certainly  did  not  make  them  perfect  soldiers  or  even 
familiar  with  the  army  [...]  also  because  they  were  considered  as  useless 
and  transitory  pleonasms."37 

Although  the  Italian  universal  and  disinterested  duty  to  serve  the  father- 
land was  still  largely  discriminatory,  the  1870-1875  reform  was  a  milestone 
in  the  evolution  of  Italian  conscription.  Actually,  Ricotti's  draft  system 
was  repeatedly  modified  up  until  the  eve  of  World  War  I  according  to  the 
technical  assumptions  and  political  frameworks  current  at  any  time.38 
Nevertheless,  these  reforms  disputed  none  of  the  founding  principles,  such 
as  one-year  volunteerism,  nor  the  basic  assumption  that  every  citizen  should 
personally  contribute  to  the  destiny  of  his  own  country.39 


34  Del  Negro,  "La  leva  militare  in  Italia  dall'Unita  alia  Grande  Guerra",  in  particular  pp.  193-195. 

35  Ministero  della  Guerra,  Quarta  relazione  della  Commissione  d'inchiestaper  I'esercito,  p.  95. 
Moreover,  each  one-year  volunteer  provided  exemption  from  service  to  all  his  younger  brothers. 
On  one-year  volunteerism,  see  Del  Negro,  "La  leva  militare  in  Italia",  pp.  192-195. 

36  A  classical  comparative  analysis  of  European  bourgeoisies  is  Kocka,  Burgertum  im  19. 
Jahrhundert. 

37  De  Bono,  Nell'esercito  nostra  prima  della  guerra,  p.  48. 

38  For  a  synthetic  reconstruction  of  post-1870  Italian  political  framework,  see  Seton-Watson, 
Italy  from  Liberalism  to  Fascism. 

39  A  more  detailed  picture  of  the  late  nineteenth-century  Italian  recruitment  systems  is  offered 
by  Ilari,  Storia  del  servizio  militare  in  Italia,  II,  pp.  128-194.  On  the  first  decade  of  the  twentieth 
century,  see  also  Botti,  "Note  sul  pensiero  militare  italiano  da  fine  secolo  XIX  all'inizio  della 


490 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


A  difficult  transition:  from  the  pre-unification  militias  to  the 
Italian  army  (1859-1863) 

In  order  to  better  understand  the  advent  of  the  Piedmont  draft  system  as 
the  forerunner  of  the  first  Italian  conscription  law,  it  is  necessary  to  under- 
stand the  political  and  military  framework  in  which  the  transition  from 
the  dynastic  Piedmont  militia  to  the  Italian  national  army  occurred.  The 
Italian  unification  process  was  a  quite  lengthy  one.  It  started  in  1848,  with 
the  unsuccessful  war  against  the  Habsburg  Empire,  and  ended  only  after 
World  War  I  with  the  annexation  of  Trento  and  Trieste.40  However,  the  route 
to  unification  was  composed  primarily  of  sudden  events  with  unexpected 
outcomes,  such  as  the  conquest  of  Lombardy,  the  Mezzogiorno,  and  the 
ex-Papal  territories  (apart  from  Lazio)  between  1859  and  1861.  Therefore, 
after  its  formal  unification  in  1861,  the  newborn  Italian  state  was  still  not 
only  a  jigsaw  puzzle  which  the  government  had  to  assemble  as  quickly  as 
possible,  but  also  a  country  still  at  war  against  both  internal  and  external 
enemies. 

After  the  end  of  the  Second  War  of  Independence  (November  1859),  the 
government  considered  France  to  be  the  most  dangerous  external  enemy 
they  faced,  and  fear  of  an  invasion  from  the  west  deeply  affected  Italian 
military  policy  in  the  early  1860s.41  However,  the  internal  threats  would 
prove  to  be  much  more  compelling.  In  the  south,  the  new  Italian  army  had  to 
continue  the  long  war  against  the  Brigantaggio.  Moreover,  the  unexpected 
conquest  of  the  southern  regions  and  the  central  role  played  by  Garibaldi's 
all-voluntary  Southern  Army  in  defeating  the  Bourbons  became  deeply 
problematic  when  the  political  expectations  of  those  people  had  gone 
unmet.  Fulfilling  the  liberal-monarchic-sponsored  plan  under  the  Savoy 
flags,  rather  than  marching  on  Rome,  had  disappointed  the  remaining 
members  of  the  Risorgimento  movement  and  further  solidified  the  divisions 
between  the  volunteers  and  the  regular  army.  The  liberal  establishment 
considered  republicans  such  Mazzini  and  Garibaldi  to  be  internal  enemies 

prima  guerra  mondiale.  Parte  I",  and  "Note  sul  pensiero  militare  italiano  da  fine  secolo  XIX 
all'inizio  della  prima  guerra  mondiale.  Parte  II". 

40  The  most  important  steps  in  the  Italian  unification  process  were:  the  Third  War  of  Independ- 
ence which  obtained  Venetia  (1866),  the  gunfights  against  Garibaldi's  followers  in  Aspromonte 
(1862)  and  Mentana  (1867),  the  Brigandage  in  the  southern  regions  (1861-1865),  the  revolt  in 
Palermo  (1866),  and  the  conquest  of  Rome  (1870).  An  overview  of  the  Italian  Risorgimento  is 
provided  by  Riall,  The  Italian  Risorgimento. 

41  The  influence  of  the  French  threat  on  the  territorial  distribution  of  the  Italian  army  in  the 
1860s  has  been  analyzed  by  Bertinara,  "Lo  stanziamento  dell'esercito  italiano  in  eta  liberale". 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


491 


because  of  their  critical  attitude  toward  the  new  monarchic  state,  and  the 
Piedmont  General  Staff  was  coming  to  seriously  mistrust  the  spontane- 
ous "militarization  from  below"42  that  they  considered  to  be  the  military 
expression  of  antimonarchy  sentiment. 

The  government  had  to  reconcile  a  compelling  need  to  defuse  the 
republican  and  anti-unification  threats  with  the  military  necessity  to 
rapidly  integrate  different  forces  into  a  larger  national  army,  able  to  face  the 
challenges  posed  by  any  kind  of  enemy  This  double  necessity  led  the  liberal 
establishment  to  opt  for  a  short-term  solution,  to  postpone  the  systematic 
and  effective  reformation  of  the  body  of  the  military,  and  to  deal  with  the 
problems  one  at  a  time  through  ad  hoc  measures. 

According  to  this  approach,  the  1854  conscription  law  was  extended 
tout  court  to  Lombardy  in  June  1859.  Shortly  afterwards,  a  provisional  draft 
system,  modeled  on  the  one  previously  established  in  Piedmont,  was  set  up 
in  Tuscany.  In  both  Lombardy  and  Tuscany,  conscripts  easily  made  up  the 
required  numbers.  Drafting  southern  youngsters  was  much  more  difficult 
and  politically  unprofitable;  therefore,  only  2,311  (out  of  3,600)  ex-Bourbon 
commissioned  officers  (COs)  were  allowed  to  join  the  national  army  and 
most  rank-and-file  soldiers  were  automatically  discharged.  Only  the  young- 
est ones  (those  who  were  born  between  1837  and  1840)  were  reenrolled, 
according  to  local  conscription  law  because  they  were  considered  by  the 
Piedmont  establishment  to  be  the  only  part  of  the  former  Bourbon  army 
not  yet  "corrupted  by  the  education  they  had  received".43  In  other  words, 
they  were  young  enough  to  embrace  the  Savoy  cause.  However,  this  proved 
to  be  an  illusion,  since  most  of  the  ex-Bourbon  soldiers  failed  to  report  to 
the  corps  when  called  up,  and  the  military  authorities  had  to  use  extreme 
measures  even  to  enlist  fewer  than  48,000  men  over  approximately  three 
years.  This  was  certainly  "not  a  satisfying  result".44 

Regardless,  the  most  delicate  question  was  how  to  handle  the  approxi- 
mately 50,000  volunteers  enlisted  in  the  Southern  Army.  In  the  fall  of  i860, 
the  minister  of  war,  General  Manfredo  Fanti,  had  complained  about  the 
volunteers'  scanty  military  experience,  but  the  issue  of  maintaining  the 
integrity  of  the  army  clearly  overwhelmed  this  military  concern.  In  actual- 
ity, this  was  a  purely  political  matter,  since  the  Piedmont  establishment 
was  not  concerned  by  the  volunteers'  lack  of  technical  know-how  and 
experience.  Rather,  they  were  worried  about  the  volunteers'  republican 

42  Del  Negro,  "Introduzione:  militarizzazione  e  nazionalizzazione  nella  storia  d'ltalia". 

43  Guarnieri,  Otto  anni  di  storia  militare  in  Italia,  p.  451. 

44  Mazzetti,  "Dagli  eserciti  pre-unitari  all'esercito  italiano",  p.  574. 


492 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


sympathies  and  their  blind  obedience  to  their  charismatic  leader  -  General 
Garibaldi  -  instead  of  to  royal  authority. 

From  the  liberal-monarchic  point  of  view,  Garibaldi's  explicit  acceptance 
of  the  king's  leadership  and  the  fierce  Italian  nationalism  of  the  Southern 
Army's  soldiers  clearly  did  not  suffice.  Moreover,  it  was  quite  complicated 
to  integrate  people  with  such  different  loyalties,  expressed  by  very  different 
battle  cries,  into  the  same  army.  While  Garibaldi's  volunteers  went  to  battle 
shouting  "Viva  I'ltalia!"  ("Long  live  Italy!"),  thus  making  no  reference  at  all  to 
the  monarchy,  the  traditional  battle  cry  of  the  Piedmont  army  was  "Avanti 
Savoia!"  ("Let's  go,  Savoy!").  Even  more  importantly,  before  receiving  a  gun, 
soldiers  had  to  swear  "loyalty  to  the  King  and  His  Royal  Successors".45 

It  should  be  noted  that  the  moderate  government  largely  misunderstood 
the  complex  nature  ofvolunteerism,  especially  regarding  the  motives  of  the 
southern  volunteers.  In  actuality,  the  liberals  failed  to  fully  appreciate  how 
differently  the  many  components  of  the  voluntary  forces  felt  about  the  new 
state;  rather,  they  mechanically  linked  any  kind  of  military  volunteerism 
with  republicanism.  As  the  framework  on  which  the  newborn  kingdom  was 
built  was  very  fragile,  arming  thousands  of  potential  enemies  of  the  crown 
was  a  risk  no  government  wanted  to  take. 

Therefore,  it  was  no  surprise  that,  as  early  as  November  of  i860,  Minister 
Fanti  formally  disbanded  the  Southern  Army,  vastly  underestimating  the 
ramifications  that  this  decision  would  have  upon  the  Brigantaggio's  rising 
in  the  Mezzogiorno  and  the  attitudes  of  former  volunteers  toward  the  new 
state.46  These  people  were  severely  disappointed:  they  had  risked  their  lives 
in  the  fight  for  national  unification,  but  now  were  paradoxically  discrimi- 
nated against.  Meanwhile,  the  state  they  had  fought  to  build  welcomed  into 
its  armed  forces  men  who  had  fought  against  it,  and  then  had  been  accepted 
as  "brothers  in  arms"  simply  by  changing  their  uniform  and  swearing  the 
oath. 


45  Ministero  della  Guerra,  Regolamento  di  disciplina  militare  e  di  istruzione  e  servizio  interna 
per  lafanteria,  article  1. 

46  In  the  1860s  the  southern  provinces  of  the  Italian  new  state  were  the  theatre  of  a  diffuse 
(albeit  mostly  uncoordinated)  antistate  resistance  resulting  from  a  mix  of  political,  social, 
economic,  and  purely  criminal  motives.  Termed  the  Brigantaggio  already  by  contemporaries, 
it  resulted  in  a  veritable  though  low-intensity  civil  war,  in  which  the  new  state  prevailed  also 
thanks  to  "exceptional"  laws  and  other  repressive  measures.  On  this,  see  Hobsbawm,  Primitive 
Rebels,  and  the  more  recent  work  of  Lupo,  "II  grande  brigantaggio". 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


493 


Moreover,  many  were  forced  to  resign  from  their  posts  after  the  imposi- 
tion of  humiliating  enrollment  conditions;  furthermore,  many  applications 
to  the  ministerial  commission  for  reenlistment  were  summarily  rejected.47 

In  sum,  the  liberal  establishment  preferred  the  discipline  and  political 
indifference  of  the  regular  soldiers  from  the  former  armies  (especially 
those  from  northern  regions)  to  the  patriotic  enthusiasm  of  the  genuine 
volunteers.  Evidently,  the  key  concepts  of  this  selection  were  political  reli- 
ability and  "Piedmontness",  not  patriotism  and  a  sense  of  belonging  to  the 
national  community.  These  guidelines  led  Garibaldi  himself  to  give  a  very 
polemical  speech  in  the  parliament  and  further  increased  the  strong  ten- 
sions between  liberals  and  republicans  outside  the  parliament.  This,  in  turn, 
prevented  a  constructive  debate  on  the  draft,  and  the  dichotomy  between 
the  standing  army/nation  in  arms  was  rapidly  transformed  into  one  of  the 
postunification  rhetorical  battlefields  where  the  different  factions  of  the 
Risorgimento  fought  to  achieve  their  conflicting  versions  of  the  Italian  state. 

In  fact,  Italian  liberals  and  republicans  did  not  just  propose  two  conscrip- 
tion models,  as  the  Conservatives  and  the  political  Left  and  Right  had  done 
in  revolutionary  and  postrevolutionary  France  or  in  Prussia.48  Since  the 
institutional  outcome  of  the  1859-1860  military  victories  was  clearly  provi- 
sional and  there  was  a  serious  possibility  that  the  institutional  framework  of 
the  new  state  would  soon  be  modified,  both  parties  backed  a  specific  kind 
of  army,  linking  it  (albeit  implicitly)  to  a  particular  institutional  framework. 
Moderates  wished  to  incorporate  hand-picked  members  of  Garibaldi's  army 
into  the  small  Savoy  standing  army  and  disband  every  all-volunteer  force, 
in  order  to  strengthen  the  monarchy  and  to  decisively  defeat  its  antagonists; 
on  the  other  side,  republicans  were  not  particularly  interested  in  building 
up  the  newborn  Italian  army,  since  they  considered  any  standing  army  to 
be  an  obstacle  to  the  creation  of  a  nonmonarchic  state.  Therefore,  the  only 
common  factor  between  the  various  republican  suggestions  was  replacing 
the  regular  army  with  an  all-volunteer  force.49 


47  Only  a  few  were  discharged  after  being  granted  an  extra  allowance.  See  Molfese,  To 
scioglimento  dell'esercito  meridionale  garibaldino". 

48  On  the  French  case,  see  Crepin,  La  conscription  en  debat.  On  the  Prussian  case,  see  Militar- 
geschichtliches  Forschungsamt,  M/// farisc/ze  Reformer  in  Deutschland  imrg.  undio.Jahrhundert. 

49  A  brief  synthesis  of  the  alternative  military  models  proposed  by  the  Italian  political  Left 
during  the  nineteenth  century  is  in  Ilari,  Storia  del  servizio  militare  in  Italia,  I,  ch.  7.  On  the 
National  Guard,  see  Francia,  Le  baionette  intelligenti.  On  the  shooting  societies  as  a  part  of  the 
nation-in-arms  project,  see  Pecout,  "Les  societes  de  tir  dans  l'ltalie  unifiee  de  la  seconde  moitie 
du  XIXe  siecle". 


494 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


Military  historians  have  stressed  the  decisive  role  of  this  quarrel  in 
the  formation  of  the  postunification  draft  system,50  but  there  was  no  real 
debate  on  this  topic.  Rather,  this  was  a  confrontation  between  two  (or  more) 
incompatible  concepts  of  the  nation-state  and  of  the  role  played  by  a  specific 
model  of  military  draft.  Neither  really  wanted  to  concern  themselves  with 
the  features  of  the  conscription  system  to  be  adopted  after  unification,  and 
nor  did  they  want  to  compromise  on  this  crucial  matter.  It  is  most  likely 
that  a  compromise  could  have  be  found  regarding  the  particular  features 
of  the  conscription  system,  but  it  was  not  possible  to  reconcile  the  opposing 
goals  that  moderates  and  republicans  wanted  to  achieve  through  the  draft. 

Despite  the  worldwide  fame  of  some  of  their  opponents,51  the  liberals 
won  the  fight  on  the  main  substantive  issues.  The  1859-1861  extension  of 
the  Piedmont  draft  law  to  other  northern  regions  and  the  strict  selection 
of  the  volunteers  and  former  Bourbon  soldiers  to  be  allowed  to  serve  in  the 
new  Italian  army  provide  ample  evidence  for  such  an  assertion. 

Drafting  a  nation,  making  a  state:  conscription  in  the  1860s 

The  polemics  on  the  nation-in-arms  did  not  significantly  influence  Italian 
military  policy  in  the  first  years  after  unification,  or  in  the  second  half  of  the 
1860s.  After  facing  the  1859-1861  challenges  by  extending  the  Piedmont  draft 
to  temporarily  include  the  annexed  territories,  the  government  continued 
to  follow  a  conscription  policy  based  on  La  Marmora's  system  until  the  early 
1870s.  A  new  recruitment  act  was  issued  in  1862.  Nominally,  this  was  the  first 
Italian  conscription  act.  However,  it  drew  substantially  upon  the  1854  act, 
and  it  did  not  introduce  significant  innovations  or  adapt  the  draft  system  to 
accommodate  the  traditions  and  the  needs  of  the  recently  annexed  lands.52 
This  choice  cannot  be  explained  just  by  stressing  the  incapability  of  the 
ruling  class  to  shape  a  new  draft  system,  nor  can  it  be  analyzed  simply  in 
terms  of  political  opportunity  or  of  an  increase  in  the  supply  of  military 
manpower. 

If  the  1859-1861  measures  had  successfully  resolved  some  of  the  most 
urgent  problems  stemming  from  the  sudden  unification,  confirming  La 

50  See  for  example  Mola's,  Del  Negro's,  and  La  Salvia's  essays  in  Mazzonis,  Garibaldi  condottiero. 
For  a  long-run  analysis  of  the  Italian  route  to  the  nation-in-arms,  see  Conti,  "II  mito  della  'nazione 
armata'". 

51  On  Garibaldi's  image  as  an  international  myth,  see  Riall,  Garibaldi.  On  Mazzini,  see  Smith, 
Mazzini. 

52  Ilari,  Storia  del  servizio  militare  in  Italia,  I,  p.  367. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


495 


Marmora's  draft  was  above  all  the  second  phase  of  the  broader,  coherent, 
and  mostly  successful  strategy  which  enabled  the  Italian  state  to  defeat 
all  remaining  threats  to  its  own  existence.  In  fact,  some  aspects  of  the 
pre-unification  conscription  system  perfectly  matched  both  political  and 
technical  needs  of  the  new  state.  In  1863-1865,  Italy  was  still  experiencing 
a  true  civil  war  in  the  south  and  a  centralized  modern  bureaucracy  had 
yet  to  be  created.  In  that  context,  the  draft  had  two  main  goals.  From  a 
military  point  of  view,  conscription  had  to  provide  the  regular  army  with 
the  manpower  it  needed  to  sustain  the  military  effort.  From  a  political 
point  of  view,  it  was  an  important  way  of  imposing  the  state's  presence  in 
peripheral  provinces53  and  acquainting  the  new  subjects  with  their  status 
as  Italian  citizens.54 

The  Ministry  of  War  tried  to  achieve  the  first  of  these  goals  by  conforming 
the  new  national  army's  recruitment  system  to  the  best  one  available.  As 
mentioned  above,  the  Piedmont  army  was  largely  based  on  the  French 
model,  and  the  Second  Empire's  army  was  still  the  most  feared  war  machine 
in  early  1860s  Europe.55  Therefore,  maintaining  La  Marmora's  draft  did 
not  mean  the  adoption  of  an  outdated  military  model,  nor  was  it  a  merely 
conservative  policy;  on  the  contrary,  following  the  most  imitated  European 
example  of  the  time  seemed  to  be  both  the  most  obvious  and  the  most 
effective  option.56 

Politically  speaking,  La  Marmora's  law  seemed  to  be  the  best  answer  to 
the  urgent  demand  for  "statehood".  In  fact,  Piedmont  draft's  mechanisms 
were  already  familiar  to  at  least  a  part  of  the  national  civilian  and  military 
bureaucracy,  and  they  had  been  already  tested  -  successfully  -  in  some  other 
regions,  such  as  Lombardy  and  Tuscany.  Quite  paradoxically,  imposing  the 

53  Although  the  Italian  territory  was  much  smaller  and  its  populations  were  ethnically 
homogeneous,  Italy's  attempt  in  the  1860s  to  effectively  control  its  territory  through  the  draft 
shared  some  features  with  the  attempts  made  by  some  multiethnic  states  such  as  the  Russian 
and  the  Ottoman  Empires.  On  Nicholas  I's  Russia,  see  Kagan,  The  Military  Reforms  of  Nicholas 
I.  On  the  Ottoman  Empire,  see  Bes,ikci's  contribution  in  this  volume  and  the  bibliography. 

54  Almost  all  books  for  conscripts  contained  basic  info  about  civics.  See  Sacchi,  Prima  libra  di 
lettura  aduso  delsoldato. 

55  Actually,  Napoleon  III  had  started  doubting  the  efficiency  of  the  French  army  already  in 
the  1850s.  See  Kovacs,  "French  Military  Institutions  before  the  Franco-Prussian  War".  For  a 
contemporary  Italian  judgement  stressing  the  French  army's  superiority  shortly  before  the 
Franco-Prussian  War,  see  Cala  Ulloa,  Guerra  tra  Prussia  e  Francia.. 

56  It  is  important  to  bear  in  mind  that  the  competition  among  the  European  powers  and 
the  traditionally  supranational  nature  of  military  science  contributed  to  the  standardization 
not  only  of  warfare,  but  also  of  many  aspects  of  the  peacetime  military.  On  this,  see  Posen, 
"Nationalism,  the  Mass  Army,  and  Military  Power". 


496 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


Piedmont  draft  system  upon  the  southern  part  of  the  country  helped  the 
former  Bourbon  and  Papal  civil  servants,  too.  Since,  realistically,  no  draft 
was  in  operation  in  the  Kingdom  of  the  Two  Sicilies  and  Papal  States,  most  of 
the  southern  bureaucrats  had  almost  no  expertise  in  enlistment  operations. 
Consequently,  they  had  to  learn  how  to  use  the  basic  instruments  of  the 
so-called  revolution  identitaire57  for  this  new  task.  Therefore,  the  continuity 
in  legal  framework  was  a  precious  asset,  since  it  enabled  the  Piedmont  civil 
servants  and  officers  to  better  assist  their  inexperienced  colleagues. 

In  other  words,  opting  for  the  extension  of  La  Marmora's  law,  instead  of 
creating  a  conscription  system  ex  novo,  enabled  the  Italian  authorities  to 
rapidly  establish  a  clear  rule  regarding  one  of  the  most  constraining  and 
unpopular  obligations  that  the  new  state  imposed  on  its  citizens.  Naturally, 
given  the  fragile  administrative  framework,  national  conscription  could 
not  immediately  be  put  into  effect,  and  the  first  call-up  actually  happened 
in  1864.  Nevertheless,  establishing  a  shared  legal  framework  was  a  neces- 
sary prerequisite  and  the  first  goal  to  achieve.  Enlisting  Italian  subjects 
according  to  the  pre-unification  rule  played  a  decisive  role  in  this  effort. 
Moreover,  exporting  the  Piedmont  draft  model  was  a  viable  continuation  of 
the  strategy  adopted  by  early  Italian  governments  in  several  other  critical 
fields. 

Actually,  replacing  the  previous  laws  and  institutions  with  the  Piedmont 
ones  was  the  main  way  in  which  the  liberal  establishment  was  able  to  build 
the  new  national  state.58  Furthermore,  if  forcibly  maintaining  the  previous 
regulations  was  seen  by  the  national  governments  to  be  the  best  solution 
to  quickly  standardizing  the  legal  framework  within  which  Italian  citizens 
lived,  imposing  La  Marmora's  draft  system  all  over  the  country  was  even 
more  profitable,  since  it  successfully  dealt  with  three  other  very  sensitive 
questions:  defending  the  upper  classes'  privileges  with  respect  to  military 
duty,  funding  the  enlargement  of  the  armed  forces  while  respecting  the 
postwar  budgetary  constraints,  and  keeping  most  key  positions  in  the 
army  under  the  control  of  the  Piemontese  military  establishment  even 


57  On  the  "culture  of  identification",  see  Noiriel,  La  tyrannie  du  national.  For  an  example  of 
the  manuals  addressed  to  draft  councils  to  enable  inexperienced  mayors  to  execute  the  draft 
correctly,  see  Bernoni,  Manuale  del  Consiglio  di  leva. 

58  The  Piedmont  penal  code  was  slightly  changed  in  1865  and  kept  in  force  in  all  national  courts 
(apart  from  the  Tuscan  ones)  until  1889;  the  Piedmont  school  system  was  imposed  on  all  Italian 
regions  and  the  fiscal  system  as  well.  On  Italian  state-building  in  the  1860s,  see  Romanelli, 
L'ltalia  liberale. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


497 


though  one-third  of  the  potential  draftees  hailed  from  the  Mezzogiorno.59 
La  Marmora's  draft  system  met  all  of  those  requirements. 

First,  the  1854  act  detailed  an  extensive  system  of  exemptions  and  al- 
lowed the  richest  draftees  to  buy  themselves  out  of  the  obligation  by  hiring 
a  substitute  or  paying  a  fee.  Secondly,  a  small  semiprofessional  army  was 
relatively  cheap,  as  it  was  partially  financed  by  liberation  and  replacement 
taxes.  Thirdly,  the  long  term  of  service  enabled  military  authorities  to  "Pied- 
montize"  southern  recruits.  Obviously,  there  was  no  ethnic  dimension  to 
Italian  conscription,60  nor  was  the  preference  for  Piedmont  soldiers  a  purely 
punitive  measure  aimed  at  the  defeated  former  enemies.  In  the  eyes  of 
the  liberal  establishment,  "Piedmontness"  was  not  an  ascribed,  culturally 
based  category,  but  rather  a  synonym  for  "political  reliability".  What  is  more, 
many  high-ranking  officers  of  the  former  Neapolitan  and  Tuscan  armies 
had  already  gained  this  qualification  by  demonstrating  their  unconditional 
loyalty  to  the  Savoy  cause  on  the  battlefields  in  1820-1821  and  1848.61  After 
the  extension  of  the  draft  to  non-Piedmontese  people,  even  simple  soldiers 
had  to  "learn  to  be  Piedmontese",  not  in  cultural  but  in  political  terms. 
Although  several  ex-Bourbon  soldiers  perceived  this  process  as  in  reality  a 
forced  assimilation,62  "Piedmontizing"  recruits  actually  consisted  of  trans- 
forming potentially  untrustworthy  provincial  populations  into  disciplined 
and  loyal  subjects.  The  government  was  confident  that  this  requirement 
would  be  met  once  the  recruits  had  served  five  years  under  the  command 
of  mostly  ex-Savoy  COs. 

This  kind  of  long-term  service  was  one  of  the  reasons  national  conscrip- 
tion had  to  face  very  strong  resistance  in  early  1860s  Italy,  mostly  in  those 
areas  where  the  draft  had  previously  involved  just  a  few  youngsters.63  Even 

59  Italian  census  data  from  1861  to  the  present  are  available  at  http://www.istat.it  (accessed 
15  April  2011). 

60  Ethnically  based  draft  policies  were  adopted  in  some  nineteenth-century  multiethnic 
states.  On  Russia,  see  Keep,  Soldiers  of  the  Tsar.  On  the  Ottoman  Empire,  see  Aksan,  "Ottoman 
Recruitment  in  the  Late  Eighteenth  Century".  See  also  Bes,ikci's  contribution  in  this  volume. 

61  During  the  Crimean  War,  three  of  the  five  Savoy  brigades  were  led  by  non-Piedmont  officers 
(Manfredo  Fanti,  Enrico  Cialdini,  and  Rodolfo  Gabrielli  di  Montevecchio)  who  had  previously 
joined  the  Piedmont  army.  See  Mazzetti,  "Dagli  eserciti  pre-unitari  all'esercito  italiano",  p.  564. 

62  An  example  of  ex-Bourbon  soldiers'  negative  perception  of  their  integration  into  the  new 
national  army  is  Fondazione  Archivio  Diaristico  Nazionale  [henceforth,  ADN],  Michele  Musella, 
Nacquinella  notte  de '  loFebbraio,  MP/96.  Rochat  and  Massobrio  also  underlined  that  "The  new 
unitary  army's  'Piedmontization'  was  carried  out  in  too  rigid  a  way,  and  it  caused  resentments, 
misinterpretations,  and  crises".  Rochat  and  Massobrio,  Breve  storia  dell'esercito  italiano  dah86i 
ali943,  p.  23. 

63  Del  Negro,  "La  leva  militare  in  Italia",  pp.  183-187. 


498 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


if  local  communities  often  helped  their  own  deserters  by  hiding  and  feeding 
them,  desertion  and  reluctance  were  generally  individual,  spontaneous,  and 
apolitical  phenomena  both  in  the  Mezzogiorno  and  in  the  northern  regions. 
In  other  words,  draft-dodging  did  not  always  stem  from  indifference  to  the 
new  nation-state,  nor  did  it  necessarily  express  the  rejection  of  military 
service  itself. 

As  military  court  sentences  confirmed,  many  draft-evaders  artlessly 
ignored  what  kind  of  duties  the  draft  implied  and  failed  to  report  for  military 
service  in  good  faith:  some  because  they  had  emigrated  for  seasonal  work, 
others  because  they  had  misunderstood  the  enlistment  procedure,  and  still 
others  even  because  in  the  countryside  "These  men  [...]  lived  in  a  world  in 
which  the  passage  of  time  escaped  their  grasp"64  and  basically  they  did  not 
know  that  they  were  twenty  years  old! 

Nevertheless,  many  other  youngsters  consciously  escaped  the  draft. 
Some  of  them  were  scared  of  such  an  unknown  experience;  some  others 
had  been  told  about  hard  military  life  by  ex-draftees;65  most  draftees  did  not 
want  to  leave  their  home  villages,  not  only  because  the  village  community 
was  the  only  one  to  which  they  felt  they  belonged,66  but  also  because  their 
five-year-long  absence  deprived  their  families  of  a  much-needed  source  of 
labor  and  income.67 

If  military  service  was  a  long,  unpleasant  parenthesis  in  the  lives  of 
most  Italian  conscripts,  some  youngsters  approached  the  experience  in  a 
more  positive  way.  Cultural  and  economic  factors  helped  those  men  make 
sense  of  military  service.  The  draft's  symbolic  meaning  as  a  rite  of  passage 
to  adulthood  played  a  decisive  role,  since  most  young  men  wished  to  be 
declared  fit  for  the  army  as  a  public  certification  of  their  masculinity.68 

64  Bloch,  Feudal  Society,  I,  p.  73. 

65  Like  Corselli,  Letture  educative  compilate peisoldatidelsj  reggimentofanteria,  several  other 
books  for  recruits  stressed  the  negative  influence  of  fellow  villagers'  and  ex-soldiers'  stories 
about  military  service  on  conscripts'  approach  to  service  and  tried  to  balance  them  through 
rosy  descriptions  of  military  life,  such  as  De  Amicis,  La  vita  militare.  On  the  opposition  between 
antimilitarist  and  militarist  literature,  see  Del  Negro,  "De  Amicis  Versus  Tarchetti". 

66  On  the  relationship  between  village  community  and  national  community  in  Italy,  see 
Cavazza,  Piccole  patrie.  The  Italian  situation  can  be  compared  to  the  German  one,  analyzed  by 
Conf  ino,  The  National  as  Local  Metaphor. 

67  The  attitude  of  Italian  youngsters  toward  the  draft  has  been  little  studied.  Some  information 
is  provided  by  literature.  See,  for  example,  Verga,  Cavalleria  rusticana.  On  the  reasons  for 
reluctance  in  nineteenth-century  Italy,  see  Oliva,  Esercito,  paese  e  movimento  operaio.  Italians' 
refusal  to  enlist  shared  many  features  with  desertion  in  other  countries,  such  as  France  and 
Egypt.  See  Rousseau,  Service  militaire  auXLXe  siecle,  and  Ziircher,  "The  Nation  and  Its  Deserters". 

68  Oliva,  "La  coscrizione  obbligatoria  nell'Italia  unita  tra  consenso  e  rifiuto".  This  seems  to  be 
another  aspect  of  conscription  that  enables  international  comparison,  since  such  an  ambiguous 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


499 


Therefore,  Italian  men  shared  the  ambiguous  attitude  toward  enlistment  -  a 
mix  of  fear,  resignation,  and  curiosity  -  of  many  other  rural  communities 
all  over  Europe.  Economically  speaking,  enrollment  could  even  represent 
a  profitable  employment  opportunity. 

As  the  government  pointed  out  frequently,  the  goal  of  substitution  and 
liberation  was  not  just  to  allow  the  sons  of  the  richest  classes  to  pay  for  their 
liberation,  but  also  to  employ  people  who  would  otherwise  be  considered 
unproductive  and  socially  dangerous.  Several  European  governments  justi- 
fied their  socially  discriminatory  systems  by  paternalistically  presenting 
the  exemptions  as  the  prerequisite  for  employing  lower  classes  in  the 
military.69  Also,  in  Italy  -  according  to  the  liberal  establishment  -  long-term 
service  and  replacement  had  to  be  considered  two  sides  of  the  same  coin, 
since  both  acted  in  the  "general  interest"  of  a  society  in  which  each  class 
had  to  fulfill  its  own  role. 

On  the  one  hand,  replacement  strengthened  the  social  equilibrium,  since 
it  prevented  military  obligations  from  damaging  the  careers  of  members 
of  the  future  ruling  class.  As  La  Marmora  pointed  out,  five  years  in  the 
barracks  "would  force  with  excessive  strictness  [the  draftees]  to  renounce, 
very  often  forever,  liberal  careers  and  professions,  suffering  a  destiny  much 
unluckier  than  that  of  other  classes  of  citizens  who  are  not  affected  by 
the  military  service  in  their  arts  or  jobs".70  On  the  other  hand,  although 
liberation  was  perceived  to  be  a  hateful  privilege  by  most  of  the  lower- 
middle-class  conscripts,  the  supplementary  income  from  the  liberation 
fees  was  redirected  to  the  reenrollment  fund,  thereby  perpetuating  the 
cycle  of  increased  employment  and  decreased  crime  and  social  unrest. 
Consequently,  as  the  army  would  not  have  had  enough  money  to  employ 
volunteers  without  the  liberation  fees,  it  is  probable  that  liberation  was 
also  seen  by  unemployed  young  men  as  the  major  means  by  which  the 
state  could  provide  them  with  a  military  employment  opportunity.  In  the 
nineteenth-century  Italian  labor  market,  voluntary  enlistment  and  even 
conscription  could  also  be  (or  become)  a  professional  choice. 


attitude  is  part  of  the  picture  in  almost  any  nineteenth-century  European  country.  On  France, 
see  Bozon,  Les  consents,  and  Hopkin,  Soldier  and  Peasant  in  French  Popular  Culture.  On  Germany, 
see  Frevert,  A  Nation  in  Barracks,  and  Prove,  Militar,  Staat  und  Geseltschaft  im  ig.Jahrhundert. 

69  On  France,  see  Hippler's  contribution  in  this  volume. 

70  La  Marmora's  talk  is  quoted  by  Massobrio,  Bianco,  rosso  e  grigioverde,  p.  42. 


500 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


"Conscripts  by  choice":  substitutes,  volunteers,  and  reenlisted 
soldiers  in  the  1860s 

Despite  the  double  role  of  replacement  as  the  means  permitting  the  so- 
called  "bourgeois  reluctance"71  and  as  an  employment  agency,  most  studies 
have  focused  on  the  former  aspect  of  the  system  of  exemptions,  whereas 
the  latter  has  been  largely  neglected.  This  section  deals  with  this  question 
by  briefly  analyzing  those  who  escaped  the  draft,  their  substitutes,  and  the 
reasons  some  youngsters  preferred  becoming  soldiers  to  doing  other  jobs, 
as  long  as  (re) enlistment  in  nineteenth-century  Italy  could  be  considered 
the  outcome  of  a  free  choice. 

If  we  look  substitutions  by  unrelated  people,72  one  fact  is  particularly 
noticeable:  draftees  and  their  substitutes  did  not  just  share  the  same  resi- 
dential area,  but  also  belonged  to  socially  divided  networks  located  in  the 
same  territory.  In  most  cases,  it  is  actually  impossible  to  describe  precisely 
what  kind  of  relationship  linked  those  people,  and  nor  can  we  quantify  how 
many  conscripts  knew  their  substitutes  personally.  Nevertheless,  patronage 
relationships  were  sometimes  evident,  since  the  surrogates  had  worked  for 
the  conscript's  family  before  enlisting  on  his  behalf.  Therefore,  replacing 
could  even  be  considered  as  the  continuation  of  that  work  relationship,  and 
it  remained,  substantially,  a  family  affair,  at  least  according  to  the  wider 
Latin  meaning  of  the  word  "family". 

Sometimes,  the  conscript-substitute  relationship  was  not  so  obvious. 
However,  the  overlapping  of  everyday  life-space  and  a  different  social  status 
suggests  a  previous  asymmetrical  relationship,  which  made  substitution 
quite  similar  to  the  old  regime's  recruitment  practices:  the  state  restricted 
itself  to  ratifying  a  private  contract  between  the  soldier  (now  the  substitute), 
who  was  led  to  accept  by  his  socio-economic  subordinate  status,  and  his 
"proprietor"  (the  substituted),  whose  exemption  from  serving  personally 
roughly  renewed  the  hierarchical  superiority  of  ancient  local  lords  with 
respect  to  their  own  peasants.  Several  memoirs  and  testimonies  justify 
voluntary  enlistment  as  a  substitute  by  resignedly  stressing  the  impossibil- 
ity of  denying  a  "favor"  to  a  local  notable. 

71  Del  Negro,  "La  leva  militare  in  Italia",  p.  175. 

72  If  analyzed  in  terms  of  labor  relations,  brother  and  unrelated-person  replacement  cannot  be 
confused,  since  they  took  place  within  quite  different  legal  frameworks.  Moreover,  the  agency 
of  men  involved  in  brother  substitutions  was  probably  much  more  limited,  since  the  voluntary 
enrollment  of  one  member  instead  of  another  could  be  part  of  a  family  strategy  to  minimize 
the  damage  the  draft  did  to  the  menage  familial. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


501 


In  other  cases,  there  was  no  direct  link  between  the  draftee  and  the 
substitute,  and  a  broker  paired  the  interests  of  the  elite  with  the  urgent 
needs  of  jobless  youngsters.  Theoretically  speaking,  John  Lynn  described 
a  "conscription  army"73  as  a  kind  of  military  organization  in  which  labor 
relations  are  strictly  limited  to  the  volunteers  and  the  public  authorities. 
Nevertheless,  in  practice  very  often  the  broker's  action  deeply  affected  the 
equilibrium  between  supply  of  and  demand  for  manpower  by  indirectly 
helping  the  army  employ  involuntary  instead  of  voluntary  labor.  The  broker 
also  had  an  impact  on  the  relationship  between  these  people  and  central 
power,  as  he  had  to  speak  positively  of  military  careers  and  even  provide 
potential  substitutes  with  some  essential  cultural  and  behavioral  attributes 
in  order  to  make  serving  the  state  as  appealing  as  possible  and  convince 
them  to  opt  for  a  career  that  involved  killing  and  risking  death  on  the 
battlefield  in  the  Mezzogiorno  or  elsewhere.  In  other  words,  brokers  acted 
as  middlemen  in  two  ways.  On  the  one  hand,  they  connected  two  socially 
different  worlds;  on  the  other,  they  acted  as  a  true  cultural  mediator  both 
between  the  local  culture  and  the  national  one,  and  between  the  military 
set  of  values  and  the  civilian  one. 

When  brokers  had  to  overcome  resistance,  they  did  not  hesitate  to  use 
extreme  measures  to  carry  out  their  business:  threats,  blackmail,  and  cor- 
ruption were  common  practices,  at  least  according  to  penal  court  papers. 
Actually,  moral  suasion  was  probably  the  most  commonly  used  method  of 
leaning  on  potential  surrogates,  but  it  was  informal  and  has  left  very  few 
documentary  traces.  Therefore,  it  is  difficult  to  state  when  substituting 
was  a  substantially  free  choice  and  when  it  mostly  was  the  outcome  of 
external  pressure. 

However,  hiring  a  substitute  was  not  very  difficult,  especially  in  the  first 
postunification  years.  Annual  substitution  data  suggest  a  declining  trend, 
but  confirmed  that  substitution  remained  a  fairly  common  practice  until  the 
early  1870s:  in  1863,  the  Ministry  of  War  allowed  1,654  ordinary  substitutions 
(surrogazione  ordinarid)  and  394  substitutions  between  brothers;  in  1864- 
1865, 428  substitutes  were  enlisted  (188  unrelated  people  and  240  conscripts' 
brothers).  Obviously,  the  number  dropped  in  1866-1868  because  of  the  war 
against  Austria:  the  Ministry  of  War  allowed  only  204  ordinary  substitutions 
and  152  replacements  performed  by  draftees'  brothers.  In  1868-1869,  the 
replacement  number  rose  slightly  (142  unrelated  surrogates  and  176  brothers 
were  allowed  to  serve  under  the  colors  on  behalf  of  other  men).74 

73  Lynn,  "The  Evolution  of  Army  Style  in  the  Modern  West". 

74  Torre,  Delia  leva  sui giovani  nati  nell'anno  (1864-1870). 


502 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


From  the  perspective  of  the  richest  families,  substitution  was  affordable75 
and  -  at  least  in  some  cases  -  allowed  them  to  exploit  their  local  influence  to 
force  even  unwilling  fellow  villagers  to  accept  replacement  and  to  fulfill  the 
obligation  on  their  behalf.  From  the  surrogate's  perspective,  a  fixed  salary 
was  a  tantalizing  prospect,  and  the  most  common  reason  why  both  civil- 
ian courts  and  military  authorities  had  to  deal  with  dozens  of  fraudulent 
reenlistments  every  year.'6 

Although  substitution  was  cheaper  and  easily  accessible  thanks  to  wide 
networks,  many  elite  members  preferred  paying  a  higher  fee  and  letting  the 
state  find  a  substitute  for  them.  The  liberation  tax  was  so  expensive  that 
some  people  who  had  applied  for  it  then  rejected  because  they  could  not 
actually  afford  it.77  However,  only  liberation  secured  the  replaced  draftees 
against  the  many  substitutes  who  deserted  shortly  after  taking  the  first 
payment  installment.  The  richest  Italian  families  did  not  want  to  risk  both  a 
significant  loss  of  money  and  -  especially  -  the  forced  personal  enlistment 
imposed  on  the  draftees  whose  substitutes  then  deserted,  should  they  be 
unable  to  send  a  suitable  substitute  to  the  corps  within  a  few  weeks. 

Consequently,  in  1860s  Italy,  substitution  was  a  local  phenomenon,  mostly 
involving  both  the  middle  and  the  upper  bourgeoisie,  whereas  liberation 
was  truly  elite.  Therefore,  liberation  data  can  be  considered  a  reliable  index 
of  the  upper  class's  attitude  to  military  obligation. 

First,  the  applications'  geographical  distribution  confirms  that  the  ex- 
Bourbon  subjects  were  the  ones  most  reluctant  to  join  the  military,  whereas 
only  a  few  former  Piedmont  citizens  used  their  money  to  avoid  being  drafted 
(see  Table  16.4).78  Actually,  this  is  not  surprising:  several  scholars  have  already 
emphasized  the  ex-Piedmont  subjects'  stronger  attachment  to  the  new  state's 
destiny.79  Secondly,  liberation  was  predominantly  an  urban  phenomenon:  in 

75  As  replacement  looked  more  affordable,  many  provincial  middle-lower  bourgeois  families 
contracted  debts  to  hire  a  substitute  and  then  went  bankrupt.  See  Briante,  "L'esercito  e  le  polizie". 
The  same  happened  in  France,  as  suggested  by  Kovacs,  "French  Military  Institutions  before  the 
Franco-Prussian  War",  p.  221. 

76  Some  examples  are  available  in  Archivio  di  Stato  di  Napoli  [henceforth,  ASN],  Questura  di 
Napoli,  Gabinetto,  I  parte,  reati  comuni-camorra. 

77  In  1863-1864,  for  instance,  a  good  340  draftees  rejected  liberation  after  having  applied  for 
it.  See  Torre,  Delia  leva  suigiovani  nati  nell'anno  7843,  p.  55. 

78  More  detailed  data  are  available  in  Torre,  Delia  leva  sui giovani  nati  nell'anno...  (annually). 
Although  the  author  was  biased,  in  a  letter  addressed  to  Lord  Rokeby  in  August  1864  General 
Cala  Ulloa  underlined  that  "in  the  past  four  years  only  fourteen  people  from  crowded  Naples 
enlisted  voluntarily"  and  defined  Neapolitans'  lack  of  inclination  to  enroll  a  "plebiscite  of 
reluctance":  ASN,  Questura  di  Napoli,  Gabinetto,  I  parte,  f.  17. 

79  See,  for  example,  Ilari,  Storia  del  servizio  militare  in  Italia,  I,  p.  371. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


503 


1867,  for  example,  Naples,  Palermo,  Florence,  Milan,  and  Turin  supplied  about 
20  per  cent  of  the  annual  contingent  and  40  per  cent  of  liberated  draftees.80 


Table  16.4  Origins  of  liberated  draftees  and  reenlisted  soldiers  (1867-1870) 


Former  citizenship 

Liberated  draftees 

Voluntarily  enlisted 

(%) 

men  (%) 

Kingdom  of  the  Two  Sicilies 

47.3% 

12.5% 

Kingdom  of  Lombardy- 

15.5% 

21.7% 

Venetia 

Papal  States 

13.1% 

10.8% 

Kingdom  of  Sardinia 

11.0% 

37.1% 

Grand  Duchy  of  Tuscany 

10.2% 

14.5% 

Others 

2.9% 

3.4% 

Total 

100.0% 

100.0% 

Source:  Torre,  Delia  leva  sui  giovani  natl  nell'anno  (1 867-1 870). 


On  the  other  side,  liberation  data  also  supply  scholars  with  precious  infor- 
mation about  the  other  two  actors  involved  in  replacement:  the  military 
authorities  who  selected  the  substitutes  and  the  men  who  replaced  their 
richer  countrymen.  Since,  in  liberation,  military  authorities  acted  as  a  broker 
by  encouraging  (re) enrollment  and  matching  the  conscripts'  applications 
with  the  volunteers'  enlistments,  the  draftee-broker-substitute  triangle 
was  independent  from  the  conscripts'  networks.  Therefore,  the  surrogates' 
origins  reflected  not  only  the  people's  attitude  toward  the  draft,  but  also 
the  government's  attitude  toward  the  draftees.  In  fact,  the  ruling  class's 
mistrust  of  potential  anti-Savoy  plotters  played  a  decisive  role  in  keeping 
the  number  of  southern  substitutes  low.  Consequently,  northern  citizens 
were  overrepresented  within  the  volunteers'  group. 

As  in  the  first  postunification  stages,  the  government  also  tried  to  keep 
the  army's  composition  under  control  with  respect  to  the  percentage  of 
volunteers.  La  Marmora's  law  allowed  volunteers  with  six  months  of  experi- 
ence to  apply  for  reenlistment,  giving  explicit  preference  to  all  draftees 

8o  The  data  concerning  the  origins  of  the  liberated  draftees  must  be  read  in  light  of  the  data 
on  the  whole  Italian  population.  According  to  the  1861  census,  only  14.2  per  cent  of  the  Italian 
population  lived  in  cities  with  more  than  15,000  inhabitants.  See  Malanima,  Italian  Urban 
Population,  7300-1861;  paper  available  on  http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_fde/Page646. 
htm  (accessed  28  May  2011). 


504 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


serving  for  their  last  year,  on  the  condition  that  they  had  a  clean  record  and  a 
good-conduct  certificate  from  their  previous  regiment,  were  single,  and  were 
fit  for  service.81  The  preference  for  regular  soldiers  led  military  authorities 
to  frequently  hire  men  who  were  already  under  the  flag  as  conscripts.  In 
fact,  most  substitutes  were  ajfidati  anziani?z  that  is,  they  simply  extended 
their  service  time  after  discharge.  In  other  words,  when  those  men  replaced 
their  liberated  comrades,  they  were  neither  true  volunteers  nor  conscripts. 
They  voluntarily  signed  on  to  the  army  after  having  previously  been  forced 
to  join  it.  In  short,  we  could  call  them  "conscripts  by  choice".  In  1870-1871,  for 
example,  76.5  per  cent  of  the  substitutes  were  twenty-five  to  thirty  years  old 
and  81  per  cent  had  already  served  for  at  least  five  years,  whereas  volunteers 
under  twenty-five  were  just  10  per  cent,  and  only  19  per  cent  had  not  yet  spent 
five  years  in  the  army.  In  the  previous  years,  the  picture  had  been  more  or 
less  the  same:  in  1869, 802  of  1,131  (71  per  cent)  twenty-five-  to  thirty-year-old 
men  were  enlisted,  every  one  of  them  having  served  for  at  least  five  years.83 

Again,  the  main  criteria  for  selection  was  not  the  applicants'  patriotism 
and  military  prowess,  but  their  discipline  and  respect  for  authority.  In 
1870-1871  only  933  men  of  2,460  reenlisted  men  (38  per  cent)  had  fought  for 
Italy  at  least  once  (798  once,  124  twice,  and  only  11  three  times),  while  1,527 
had  taken  part  in  no  campaign  (62  per  cent)  and  just  23  (0.9  per  cent)  had 
gained  a  medal  for  valor.84  In  1869,  veterans  constituted  647  of  1,131  (57  per 
cent),  but  574  of  them  (89  per  cent)  had  fought  only  once,  despite  the  several 
wars  Italy  had  engaged  in  between  1859  and  1868. 

Although  the  selection  process  was  not  particularly  strict,  and  most 
reenrolled  men  were  no  more  than  disciplined  soldiers,  applying  for  reen- 
listment  was  a  demanding  choice,  since  reenlisted  soldiers  had  to  serve 
for  five  more  years  and  could  not  abandon  the  army  if  they  changed  their 
minds.  However,  reenlistment  could  seem  a  good  bargain  for  many  reasons, 
especially  economic  ones.85  From  that  point  of  view,  the  Piedmont-Italian 
law  followed  the  traditional  pattern  which  assured  that  the  reenrolled  men 

81  Recruitment  law  n.  1676,  20  March  1854,  articles  109-113, 116-125, 128, 129. 

82  According  to  Torre,  Delia  leva  suigiovani  nati  nell'anno  (1867-1870),  reenlistments  were  1,324 
out  of  1,466  in  1864-1865  and  587  out  of  653  in  1865-1866. 

83  Torre,  Delia  leva  suigiovani  nati  nell'anno  7847  e  delle  vicende  dell'esercito  dal  7  ottobre  7868 
al^o  settembre  7869,  p.  140. 

84  Torre,  Delia  leva  suigiovani  nati  nell'anno  7845  e  delle  vicende  dell'esercito  dal  7  ottobre  7870 
also  settembre  7877,  p.  115. 

85  According  to  Alan  Ramsay  Skelley,  "economic  pressure  was  the  principal  impetus  to  recruit- 
ment" also  in  the  nineteenth-century  British  army.  See  Skelley,  The  Victorian  Army  at  Home, 
p.  248. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


505 


received  quite  a  high  sum  immediately  after  entering  the  corps  and  then 
extra  monthly  pay  of  12  L.  along  with  the  interest  (4-4.5  per  cent)  on  the 
whole  amount  deposited  by  the  liberated  conscript. 

Both  reenlisted  soldiers  and  scholars  pointed  out  that  the  salary  was  too 
low  to  live  a  respectable  life86  -  indeed  this  was  a  very  common  complaint 
among  European  war  professionals.  Nevertheless,  the  Italian  rank  and  file 
did  not  get  by  badly  mostly  because  the  government  handled  a  progressive 
decrease  in  available  ajfidati  by  making  a  military  career  more  and  more 
appealing  with  respect  to  monthly  salary  which  was  doubled  (from  12  to  25 
L.),  and  other  benefits,  such  as  the  pension  increase  to  300  L./year  and  the 
automatic  liberation  from  service  of  all  the  volunteer's  brothers.87 

Altogether,  the  professional  soldiers'  salaries  were  more  or  less  equivalent 
to  those  of  other  low-ranking  public  employees  and  basically  in  proportion 
to  the  modest  skills  they  had  to  offer  in  the  labor  market,  their  human 
capital.88  Moreover,  the  military  option  assured  them  of  a  certain  and 
predictable  career,  a  guaranteed  income,  and  some  comforts  most  of  them 
would  not  be  able  to  afford  otherwise:  decent  accommodation,  clothes  and 
shoes,  three  meals  a  day  (with  meat  at  one  meal)  within  a  controlled  diet 
with  limited  alcohol  consumption,  and  even  medical  care,  not  to  mention 
the  beneficial  effects  on  their  health  from  the  familiarization  with  some 
elementary  sanitary  practices  imposed  by  discipline  regulations.89  In  other 
words,  signing  on  in  the  army  could  be  somewhat  appealingbecause  it  could 
be  paradoxically  perceived  as  a  "routine  job"  like  those  in  the  bureaucracy, 
at  least  with  respect  to  the  benefits  attached.90 

Some  long-term  benefits  accompanied  the  short-term  ones.  First,  once 
definitively  discharged,  reenlisted  men  received  a  state  pension  which  was 

86  For  contemporary  complaints,  see  ADN,  Giuseppe  Tiezzi,  Ricordi  di  come  ho  trascorso  la 
mia  vita,  MP/93;  Giovanni  Viarengo,  Memorie  varie,  Mp/Adn.  On  Italian  officers'  income,  see 
Caciulli,  "La  paga  di  Marte". 

87  Reenlistment  law  n.  3062,  7  July  1866,  articles  9  and  11.  The  law  is  quoted  and  commented 
by  Torre,  Delta  leva  suigiovani  nati  nell'anno  7845  e  delle  vicende  dell'esercito  dal  7  ottobre  7865  al 
30  settembre  7866,  pp.  3-30.  It  is  interesting  that  Torre  explicitly  looked  at  the  1866  act  under  the 
light  of  the  direct  competition  for  manpower  between  the  army  and  other  employers,  whereas 
scholars  have  analyzed  it  almost  exclusively  in  terms  of  organizational  and  draft  policy.  See, 
for  example,  Ilari,  Storia  del  servizio  militare  in  Italia,  I,  pp.  282-283. 

88  On  civil  servants'  income,  see  Melis,  La  burocrazia. 

89  Some  classical  well-being  indexes  suggested  the  quality  of  life  in  the  army  was  better  than 
outside.  For  example,  soldiers  usually  put  on  weight  during  their  service.  See  Livi,  Antropometria 
militare.  On  Italian  soldiers'  everyday  life,  see  Quirico,  Naja.  On  Italian  peasants'  everyday  life, 
see  the  interviews  collected  by  Revelli,  //  mondo  deivinti. 

90  From  this  point  of  view,  Italian  reenlistment  had  much  in  common  with  the  French  system. 
See  Hippler's  contribution  in  this  volume. 


506 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


quite  low,  but  was  still  a  privilege  in  a  country  where  a  welfare  system  did 
not  exist  yet.  Secondly  as  reenlisted  men  could  not  marry  while  serving, 
they  saved  much  money  by  delaying  marriage  and  consequently  reduc- 
ing the  number  of  future  mouths  to  feed:  not  a  minor  issue  for  poor  rural 
households  whose  marginal  propensity  to  consume  was  very  low  and  whose 
consumption  composition  was  dominated  by  basic  commodities.91  Thirdly, 
all  men  who  reenlisted  as  soldiers  had  a  good  chance  to  be  promoted  as 
noncomissioned  officers  (NCOs)  and  some  possibilities  even  to  become  COs. 
Despite  the  low  salary  and  the  relatively  modest  social  status  of  lower  ranks 
in  the  military,  reenlistment  could  thus  be  a  mechanism  of  upward  social 
mobility  for  former  peasants  and  shepherds  with  few,  if  any,  other  chances 
to  improve  their  conditions  within  the  static  Italian  society  of  that  time. 

Although  the  appeal  of  a  military  career  mostly  consisted  of  its  economic 
advantages,  some  nonmaterial  benefits  also  encouraged  men  to  enlist. 
Probably  the  first  one  was  their  families'  gratitude  for  automatically  freeing 
all  their  brothers  from  service  (after  1866);  the  second  one  consisted  of 
their  own  subjective  perception  of  their  new  status;  the  third  stemmed 
from  the  social  prestige  linked  to  their  job,  at  least  in  the  small  towns 
and  the  countryside.  Psychologically,  being  part  of  a  self-referential  male- 
only  society  marked  both  inside  and  outside  by  its  own  habits,  dress,  and 
slang  was,  for  most  of  these  youngsters,  a  source  of  pride  in  and  of  itself.92 
Furthermore,  the  literate  soldiers  could  even  imagine  themselves  as  those 
patriotic  warrior  heroes  that  Romanticism  had  made  famous  worldwide 
and  that  schoolbooks  described  as  models  of  virtue.93 

Socially,  wearing  the  uniform  during  parades  provided  these  uninfluen- 
tial  youngsters  with  people's  admiration,94  despite  their  social  background 
and  current  economic  conditions.  In  addition,  the  liberal  ruling  class 
promoted  an  intensive  media  campaign  to  minimize  the  contribution  of 
a  democratic  military  to  the  unification  process  and  to  stress  "the  role  the 
army  had  played  in  the  founding  myth  of  the  national  community,  namely, 


91  Scarpellini,  L'ltalia  del  consumi. 

92  For  a  recent  sociological  analysis  of  group  dynamics  mostly  focusing  on  the  Italian  army, 
see  Battistelli,  Ammendola,  and  Greco,  Manuale  disociologia  militare. 

93  Patriotic  soldiers  and  their  heroic  deeds  constituted  the  most  common  plot  of  the  novels 
addressed  to  both  soldiers  and  students.  See  Rigotti  Colin,  "L'dge  d'or'de  la  litterature  d'enfance 
etde jeunesse  italienne. 

94  Italian  military  parades  perfectly  reflected  George  Mosse's  idea  of  mass  ceremonies  as 
nationalization  and  legitimizing  means.  See  Porciani,  Lafesta  della  nazione.  For  a  coeval  example 
of  soldiers'  pride  deriving  from  taking  part  in  parades,  see  Repetto,  Rimpatrio. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


507 


war".95  Therefore,  the  habitual  fascination  with  uniforms  was  boosted  by 
periodic  celebrations  in  which  reenlisted  soldiers  proudly  led  the  rank  and 
file  thanks  to  their  long  experience  in  the  regiments. 

Altogether,  both  material  and  nonmaterial  benefits  could  explain  why 
some  men  reenlisted,  despite  long  marches,  hard  training,  and  the  strong 
appeal  of  and  opportunitie  in  paramilitary  professions,  such  as  Custom 
and  Forrestal  guards,  where  many  ex-conscripts  found  "more  present 
advantages  and  good  pensions  for  the  future".96  Nevertheless,  a  major  role 
in  encouraging  conscripts  to  reenlist  was  likely  played  by  the  very  fact  that 
they  were  now  senior  soldiers.  As  briefly  mentioned  above,  several  men 
refused  to  enlist  voluntarily  because  of  the  fear  of  a  sudden  and  radical 
lifestyle  change.  And,  according  to  the  draftees'  memoirs,  the  first  steps  as 
a  junior  recruit  were  effectively  an  ordeal.  On  the  one  hand,  recruits  were 
forced  to  redefine  their  networks  in  a  hostile  environment  whose  rules 
deeply  affected  sociability  even  among  peers.  On  the  other  hand,  some 
of  the  typical  military  rites  of  passage  (hair  cutting,  wearing  of  uniform, 
etc.)  suddenly  altered  the  draftees'  appearance  and  brought  their  previous 
set  of  values  into  question.  Consequently,  most  recruits  experienced  a  sort 
of  loss  of  individuality,  which  was  made  worse  both  by  the  compulsory 
abandonment  of  their  own  dialects  (at  least  in  official  conversations)  and 
by  the  senior  soldiers'  attempts  to  impose  the  informal  hierarchy  upon  the 
newcomers  by  force. 

When  draftees  had  to  decide  their  future  after  discharge,  they  had 
already  passed  this  difficult  phase.  Actually,  the  ajfidati  anziani  could 
attain  the  unofficial  rank  of  senior  (anziano).  And  life  in  the  barracks  was 
much  more  pleasant  for  senior  soldiers  even  if  rules  were  theoretically  the 
same  for  everyone.  Their  comrades'  respect  and  the  constraints  of  discipline 
varied  according  to  seniority,  sometimes  even  despite  ranks  and  positions. 
Therefore,  the  first  year  in  the  army  was  unanimously  considered  to  be  the 
hardest,  not  only  because  of  the  extreme  rigidity  of  the  NCOs'  control,  but 
also  because  of  the  psychological  pressure  and  the  physical  violence  which 
characterized  the  asymmetrical  relationship  between  senior  soldiers  and 
the  younger  ones. 

95  Mondini,  "Esercito  e  Nazione",  p.  106.  Naturally,  linking  warfare  and  nation-building  is  not 
an  Italian  peculiarity.  For  the  British  case,  see  Colley,  Britons;  for  the  German  one,  see  Ritter, 
The  Sword  and  the  Scepter,  especially  vol.  I,  The  Prussian  Tradition,  1740-7S90.  For  a  comparative 
approach,  see  Leonhard,  Bellizismus  und Nation. 

96  Torre,  Delia  leva  suigiovani  nati  nell'anno  7845  e  delle  vicende  dell'esercito  dal  7  ottobre  7865 
also  settembre  7866,  p.  9. 


508 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


Several  memoirs  and  even  some  official  studies  remarked  on  the  high 
rate  of  mortality  in  the  Italian  barracks  during  the  first  year  of  service.97 
One  explicitly  linked  mortality  to  hazing,  while  most  testimonies  restricted 
themselves  to  describing  the  officers'  attitude  to  "reconcile  discipline 
with  the  indispensable  regard  and  special  consideration"  towards  "senior 
soldiers  who  knew  one  more  than  the  devil".98  Such  an  unwritten  untouch- 
ability  was  confirmed  also  by  court-martial  statistics:  senior  soldiers 
were  sentenced  much  more  infrequently  and  mildly  than  their  younger 
comrades.99Therefore,  it  is  at  least  plausible  that  another  reason  why  con- 
scripts reenlisted  was  that  they  had  already  passed  the  adaptation  phase 
of  military  life  and  consequently  they  attained  the  privileges  of  their  rank 
in  the  informal  hierarchy  of  the  regiment. 

Although  at  a  first  glance  senior  soldiers  had  more  than  one  good  reason 
for  reenlisting,  for  some  of  them  commodifying  their  labor  was  much  more 
a  forced  choice  than  the  outcome  of  a  freely  defined  strategy.  According 
to  La  Marmora's  law,  youngsters  were  recruited  at  the  age  of  twenty  and 
they  actively  served  for  five  years  before  discharge.  Therefore,  military 
service  not  only  stripped  draftees  of  about  one-seventh  (and  even  more  in 
the  poor  southern  regions  with  lower  life  expectancy  rates)  of  their  whole 
life, 100  but  also  broke  their  cycle  of  life  exactly  at  the  core  point.  Naturally, 
the  military  service's  effects  on  the  recruits'  cycles  of  life  changed  accord- 
ing to  individual  situation.  However,  going  home  after  military  service 
was  a  shock  for  many  conscripts,  as  they  found  their  own  world  totally 
changed.  In  fact,  during  the  conscripts'  absence,  parents  or  relatives  often 
died,  girlfriends  married  other  villagers,  and  friends  emigrated  forever.101  It 
was  no  coincidence  that  draftees  left  their  villages  only  after  saying  a  final 
goodbye  to  all  their  fellow  villagers. 


97  Sormani,  Mortatita  delt'esercito  italiano. 

98  Lazzerini,  In  caserma,  pp.  125-126.  Naturally,  descriptions  of  hazing  largely  differed  accord- 
ing to  the  rank  of  the  memoirist.  It  was  depicted  from  the  officers'  perspective  by  De  Rossi,  La 
vitadiun  ufficiale  italiano  sino  alia  guerra,  while  it  was  reported  from  the  simple  soldiers'  point 
of  view  by  ADN,  L.D.M.,  Ragazzo,  alpino,  para,  Mg/01. 

99  Rovinello,  "Tra  Marte  ed  Atena".  An  opposing  trend  characterized  1830s  French  substitutes. 
See  Humann,  "Rapport  au  Roi  presentant  le  compte  general  de  l'administration  de  la  justice 
militaire",  p.  502. 

100  In  1874,  the  life  expectancy  at  the  age  of  20  was  still  just  37.7  years  (31.2  at  birth):  Corsini, 
"Per  una  storia  della  statura  in  Italia  nell'ultimo  secolo",  p.  18. 

101  Popular  songs  and  tales  are  very  interesting  sources  for  analyzing  the  discharged  draftees' 
perception  of  their  experience  in  the  military.  See  Ferraro,  Canti  popolari  monferrini,  and  Nigra, 
Canti  popolari  del  Piemonte. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


509 


The  draft  affected  many  youngsters'  professional  lives  too.  Actually,  the 
military  service's  consequences  on  the  professional  sphere  largely  depended 
on  the  draftee's  job.  Obviously,  peasants  were  less  disturbed  by  draft,  since 
they  could  go  back  home  and  start  again  tilling  the  soil  without  looking  for 
another  job.  And  finding  a  job  after  discharge  was  quite  easy  for  farmhands 
too.  Even  if  the  long  absence  from  the  village  weakened  the  conscripts'  social 
capital,  the  draft  was  not  perceived  by  their  fellow  villagers  as  a  voluntary 
absence.  Thus,  most  draftees  were  not  excluded  from  the  informal  welfare 
system  which  traditionally  helped  the  former  emigrants  to  get  back  into 
the  local  community  and  the  working  world.102 

By  contrast,  craftsmen  were  more  damaged  by  the  draft,  since  most  of 
them  were  still  doing  an  apprenticeship  with  older  artisans  when  they  were 
drafted.  As  true  vocational  training  was  still  to  be  defined  in  nineteenth- 
century  Italy,  learning  by  doing  represented  the  core  of  apprenticeship. 
Therefore,  abandoning  their  apprenticeship  for  five  years  in  practice 
thwarted  any  plan  and  mostly  forced  former  conscripts  to  be  content  with 
less  remunerative  jobs.  Although  the  skills  required  for  setting  up  shop  were 
not  very  complex,  those  young  men  had  not  still  acquired  enough  expertise 
to  be  able  to  work  on  their  own.  Moreover,  most  ex-conscripts  joined  the 
army  with  very  low  educational  attainment  and  regimental  schools  did 
not  really  help  them  improve  their  nonmilitary  knowhow,  since  training 
and  schooling  in  the  military  primarily  aimed  to  transform  recruits  into 
disciplined  soldiers.  Once  discharged,  this  techno-military  knowhow  was 
the  only  skill  conscripts  had  gained  by  serving.  Such  expertise  had  little 
use  outside  the  army,  whereas  many  memoirs  stressed  the  difficulties  that 
former  draftees  faced  once  they  tried  to  start  their  "career"  again.103 

In  short,  many  Italian  ex-draftees  shared  the  postdischarge  destiny  of 
their  Austrian  and  French  comrades,  as,  after  many  years  in  the  army,  they 
had  no  other  professional  choice  than  to  "voluntarily"  remain  soldiers.104 
Naturally,  this  circumstance  cannot  be  generalized,  especially  because  no 
source  enables  us  to  know  the  reenlisted  men's  professional  background 
and  to  precisely  quantify  the  percentage  of  craftsmen  within  this  group. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  very  likely  that  the  reduction  of  the  civilian  employment 
chances  stemming  from  five-year-long  military  service  led  conscripts  to 
reenlist. 

102  On  the  informal  welfare  system  operating  in  most  nineteenth-century  Italian  villages,  see 
Lorenzetti  and  Merzario,  Ilfuoco  acceso. 

103  Fambri,  "La  societa  e  la  Chiesa". 

104  See  Deak,  Beyond  Nationalism,  and  Hippler's  contribution  in  this  volume. 


510 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


Altogether,  analyzing  military  recruitment  in  terms  of  labor  relations 
leads  us  to  underline  both  the  limits  of  some  previous  interpretations 
of  reenlistment  and  the  problems  originating  in  the  use  of  the  official 
taxonomy  in  describing  social  actors'  professional  choices.  On  the  one 
hand,  reenlistment  cannot  be  simply  considered  as  a  sign  of  the  ex-soldiers' 
patriotism.  Other  decisive  factors  -  both  economic  and  noneconomic  -  en- 
couraged draftees  to  reenlist  in  the  army.  On  the  other  hand,  the  boundary 
between  volunteerism  and  compulsory  service,  as  well  as  that  between 
forced  and  commodified  military  labor,  was  not  so  clear.  Actually,  most 
affidati  were  draftees  who  prolonged  their  term  of  service.  In  other  words, 
compulsory  service  and  volunteerism  were  not  two  antagonistic  approaches 
to  military  life,  but  two  successive  phases.  At  the  same  time,  the  volunteer 
status  of  many  reenlisted  men  was  questionable,  since  commodifying  their 
labor  force  in  the  army  after  discharge  could  be  read  as  the  consequence 
of  the  juridical  constraints  that  forced  these  people  to  serve  as  conscripts 
and  -  in  so  doing  -  to  renounce  any  other  career. 

Generally  speaking,  the  1860s  Italian  army  was  a  "typical"  conscript 
standing  army,  and  it  simply  consisted  of  randomly  selected  conscripts, 
volunteers,  and  voluntarily  reenlisted  soldiers.  Practically,  some  features 
of  the  Italian  military  system  made  the  army  not  correspond  to  the  theory. 
First,  conscription  was  not  universal,  and  it  actually  involved  only  the 
poorest  part  of  the  fit  young  population.  Secondly,  most  "true  volunteers" 
(those  who  had  left  their  own  home  to  join  the  army  during  the  1859-1860 
campaigns)  were  discharged  shortly  after  the  end  of  the  war,  since  they  were 
suspected  of  antimonarchy  sentiment.  Therefore,  volunteerism  was  mostly 
an  alternative  to  the  regular  army,  not  a  part  of  it.  Thirdly,  long-term  ser- 
vice and  the  government's  preference  for  a  French-style  semi-professional 
militia  kept  the  1860s  Italian  army's  professionalization  rate  high.  This 
policy  enabled  the  army  to  act  as  a  great  employer  in  nineteenth-century 
Italian  labor  market,  but  it  also  affected  the  demand/supply  equilibrium 
by  drastically  reducing  conscripts'  freedom  of  choice,  both  while  serving 
and  after  discharge. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


511 


From  state-building  to  nation-building:  volunteers  and  draftees 
in  Italy  after  1870 

Although  scholars  still  discuss  whether  Ricotti's  reform  was  a  continuation 
of  the  Destra  Storica's  military  policy,105  the  attempt  to  balance  the  army's 
social  composition  "in  name  of  a  principle  of  sacred  equality  among  all 
citizens  in  face  of  the  so-called  blood  tax"106  represented  a  true  cultural 
and  practical  revolution  which  had  important  consequences  for  post-1870 
labor  relations  within  the  military.  The  most  relevant  one  concerned  the 
change  in  the  general  attitude  toward  commodifying  military  labor.  During 
the  1860s,  Catholic  values107  and  personal  benefits  stemming  from  service 
were  largely  used  by  the  liberal  ruling  class  for  ideologically  justifying  the 
military  obligation.  The  extra  allowance  for  reenlistment  was  obviously 
one  of  the  most  convincing  arguments. 

In  addition,  commodifying  the  labor  force  was  largely  accepted  as  a 
legitimate  economic  behavior,  just  as  paying  for  liberation  was  mostly 
considered  to  be  a  right  indissolubly  attached  to  elite  status.  In  other  words, 
both  practices  were  not  only  legal,  but  also  morally  acceptable.  This  idea  of 
military  obligation  had  been  hegemonic  for  some  years.  However,  already 
in  the  second  half  of  the  1860s,  the  1854/1862  recruitment  system  started 
showing  its  limits.  On  the  one  hand,  a  mix  of  cultural  (the  end  of  patriotic 
enthusiasm),  demographic  (the  retirement  of  most  of  the  veterans  of  the 
battles  of  the  Risorgimento),  and  economic  (the  increasing  job  supply 
deriving  from  the  recent  industrialization  in  northern  Italy,  that  is,  the 
traditional  source  of  volunteers)108  factors  reduced  the  number  of  volunteers. 
Consequently,  the  military  administration  was  soon  forced  to  allow  lib- 
erations without  having  enough  substitutes  to  comply  with  the  numerous 
applications,  and  not  to  renounce  the  precious  income  stemming  from  the 
related  fees.  In  practice,  liberation  rapidly  became  a  sort  of  ill-concealed 
exemption  tax. 

105  The  Ricotti  policy's  continuity  with  those  of  his  predecessors  was  first  suggested  by  Corsi, 
Italia,  1870-1895.  For  a  contrasting  view,  see  Minniti,  "Preparazione  ed  iniziativa". 

106  Ricotti's  report  on  his  law  proposal  is  quoted  by  Ilari,  Storia  delservizio  militare  in  Italia,  II, 
p.  285. 

107  Although  the  religious  tolerance  stated  by  the  1848  constitution  and  the  tensions  with 
the  pope  prevented  Catholicism  from  supplying  official  ideological  justification  for  the  draft, 
Christian  virtues  played  a  central  role  in  Italian  pedagogy  for  conscripts.  See  Paiano,  "Religione 
e  patria  negli  opuscoli  cattolici  per  l'esercito  italiano".  The  same  happened  in  tsarist  Russia.  See 
Wirtschafter,  From  Serfs  to  Russian  Soldiers.  On  the  French  case,  see  Roynette,  "Bans  pour  le 
service",  chs  5-6. 

108  The  opposite  trend  is  precisely  described  in  Del  Negro,  "La  leva  militare  in  Italia",  p.  191. 


512 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


On  the  other  hand,  La  Marmora's  discriminatory  draft  contributed 
little  to  making  the  army  a  well-organized  war  machine  and  an  efficient 
nationalization  agency  even  if  the  liberal  propaganda  continuously  stressed 
the  central  role  of  the  army  in  "making  the  Italians".  In  this  context,  the 
defeats  in  Custoza  and  Lissa  during  the  Third  War  of  Independence  (1866) 
against  Austria  did  not  cause  the  definitive  crisis  of  La  Marmora's  approach 
to  the  recruitment  question,  but  reinforced  a  preexisting  double  trend: 
on  the  one  side,  poor  military  performance  discredited  the  army's  public 
image  definitively,  and  transformed  a  military  career  into  an  unattractive 
professional  choice;  on  the  other  side,  military  defeat  was  attributed  to  the 
soldiers'  lack  of  attachment  to  the  nation.  Consequently,  military  obligation 
officially  became  a  personal  duty,  the  possibility  to  buy  oneself  out  of  the 
obligation  was  denounced  as  illegitimate,  and  the  army  stopped  employ- 
ing a  commodified  labor  force  because  allowing  liberation  was  morally 
equivalent  to  letting  people  betray  their  country. 

In  addition,  from  the  1870s  onwards  Italian  youngsters  had  fewer  good 
reasons  to  reenlist.  The  army  was  no  longer  a  mechanism  for  upward 
mobility.  Budgetary  constraints  drastically  reduced  soldiers'  promotions 
to  NCOs.  Moreover,  NCOs  from  the  rank  and  file  had  very  few  chances  to 
become  COs  without  attending  academy  courses.109  The  advantages  of  a  good 
standardized  educational  background  were  evident  by  then,  especially  in 
countries  -  such  as  Italy  -  where  officers  had  the  crucial  mission  of  shaping 
recruits  both  morally  and  patriotically.  In  fact,  these  "national  cadres"  were 
expected  to  have  sufficient  technical  knowledge,  adequate  education,  and 
certain  pro-monarchy  and  antisocialist  inclinations  which  the  government 
supposed  were  naturally  linked  to  higher  social  ranks.110  Being  bourgeois 
was  regarded  as  a  guarantee  on  its  own,  the  way  "Piedmontness"  had 
been  immediately  after  unification.  Therefore,  high  fees  and  scholarships 
reserved  for  officers'  sons  prevented  most  of  the  common  people  from 
embarking  upon  a  military  career  and  definitely  made  the  high  ranks  in 
the  army  an  elite-only  prerogative.111  Most  conscripts  perfectly  understood 


109  The  professionalization  of  the  officer  corps  was  a  European  trend  in  the  second  half  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  On  the  professionalization  of  the  German  officer  corps,  see  Demeter, 
The  German  Officer  Corps  in  Society  and  State.  On  the  French  side,  see  Strieter,  "An  Army  in 
Evolution". 

110  On  the  COs'  leading  role  in  the  army's  nationalization  effort  in  the  1870S-1880S,  see  Del 
Negro,  "La  professione  militare  nel  Piemonte  costituzionale  e  nell'Italia  liberale". 

111  On  military  schools  and  academies  in  nineteenth-century  Italy,  see  Caciulli,  "II  sistema 
delle  scuole  militari  in  eta  liberale",  and  Pecchioli,  Le  accademie  e  le  scuole  militari  itatiane. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


513 


the  message  and  preferred  to  be  discharged  after  the  regular  term.112  Very 
limited  career  prospects  and  discrimination  in  the  regiment's  everyday 
life113  became  additional  reasons  for  the  professional  soldiers'  discontent, 
already  stoked  by  the  ever  more  antimilitarist  Zeitgeist  prevailing  in  the 
so-called  Age  of  Capital. 

In  the  1870S-1880S,  most  draftees  perceived  military  life  not  only  as 
routine,  out  of  date,  and  brutal,114  but  also  as  an  unprofitable  parenthesis  to 
close  as  soon  as  possible.  Although  many  conscripts'  memoirs  still  spoke  of 
military  service  as  a  hard  and  long  experience,115  it  was  no  longer  the  five- 
year-long  uprooting  ordeal.  Both  the  term  reduction  and  Ricotti's  insistence 
on  the  integration  between  the  army  and  civilian  society  enabled  draftees  to 
still  "feel  like  civilians"  while  serving  and  to  quickly  reintegrate  themselves 
in  their  village  communities  once  they  were  discharged. 

As  long  as  recruits  were  under  the  colors,  the  1872  discipline  regula- 
tions encouraged  them  to  establish  relations  with  locals.  Furthermore, 
conscripts  had  to  attend  not  only  elementary  school  courses,  but  also 
periodic  conferences  about  practical  subjects  such  as  hygiene,  agronomy, 
and  family  management.  Obviously,  political  and  moral  indoctrination  was 
the  core  of  those  lessons,  since  the  liberal  government  wanted  ex-draftees 
to  "continue  their  beneficial  action  by  spreading  the  habit  of  wisely  living 
and  the  deep  respect  for  the  laws  in  the  whole  nation",116  especially  among 
those  youngsters  who  had  escaped  the  intensive  indoctrination  process 
thanks  to  a  "good  number".  However,  the  effective  and  systematic  education 
program  laid  out  by  Ricotti's  regimental  schools  reform  of  1872  also  provided 
draftees  with  precious  nonmilitary  skills  they  could  successfully  use  in 
the  civilian  labor  market  along  with  their  social  capital.117  When  conscripts 
came  back  home  after  "only"  thirty  months  under  the  colors,  they  could 

112  Many  memoirs  talk  about  the  author's  refusal  to  reenlist.  See  ADN,  E.  Serventi,  Epistolario, 
E/89,  p.  24. 

113  General  De  Bono  stated  that  the  former  NCOs  who  were  promoted  as  COs  were  usually 
ostracized  in  everyday  barracks  life  by  their  own  colleagues  who  had  attended  academy  courses. 
See  De  Bono,  Neil'esercito  nostra  prima  della  guerra,  p.  27. 

114  On  the  nineteenth-century  spirit,  see  Hobsbawm,  The  Age  of  Capital,  7848-18/5. 

115  ADN,  S.S.,  La  storia  difamiglia,  Mp/91,  pp.  36-37. 

116  Ministero  della  Guerra,  Regolamento  di  disciplina  militare  del  7.  dicembre  78/2,  article  10,  §  46. 

117  On  regimental  schools,  see  Manghi,  "Scuola  e  caserma";  Mastrangelo,  Le  "scuole  reggimentali" 
7848-7973;  Della  Torre,  "Le  scuole  reggimentali  di  scrittura  e  lettura  tra  il  Regno  di  Sardegna  e  il 
Regno  d'ltalia".  On  Italian  military  pedagogy,  see  Labanca,  "I  programmi  dell'educazione  morale 
del  soldato".  Italian  pedagogic  effort  had  much  in  common  with  those  elsewhere,  e.g.,  in  France, 
Germany,  and  the  United  Kingdom.  See  Roynette,  "Boris  pour  le  service",  chs  5-6;  French,  Military 
Identities,  ch.  3;  Kirn,  Soldatenleben  in  Wurttemberg  7877-7974,  ch.  16. 


514 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


still  rely  on  their  previous  networks  and  -  in  addition  -  they  had  acquired 
significant  human  capital.  It  consisted  not  only  of  reading,  writing,  and 
other  practical  skills,  but  also  of  the  social  prestige  they  gained  within  their 
own  village  communities  thanks  to  the  experience  they  had  had  during 
military  service.  Conscripts  traveled  a  lot,  visited  big  cities,  took  part  in 
grandiose  ceremonies,  and  sometimes  even  met  the  king  personally;  in 
other  words,  military  service  made  them  more  educated  and  open-minded 
than  most  of  their  fellow  villagers.  This  was  a  significant  competitive  advan- 
tage within  local  labor  markets  and  enabled  former  conscripts  to  become 
well-respected  members  of  their  village  communities  despite  their  young 
age.  Therefore,  discharged  draftees  were  really  free  to  choose  their  job  either 
in  the  military  or  civilian  world,  as  long  as  these  two  options  existed.  And 
most  ex-conscripts  chose  the  second  option. 

Actually,  the  increasing  lack  of  substitutes  was  not  a  minor  factor  in  the 
government's  decision  to  banish  commodified  labor  force  from  the  army. 
Although  the  defeat  in  the  1866  war  played  a  role  in  bringing  commodifica- 
tion  into  question  both  from  a  military  and  an  ethical  point  of  view,  it  would 
be  misleading  to  read  the  renunciation  of  reenlistment  as  an  unilateral  and 
strictly  political  choice.  The  evolution  in  the  Italian  mentality  and  the  labor 
market  affected  labor  relations  within  the  military  as  well. 

For  years  the  Italian  semiprofessional  army  had  successfully  fought  for 
manpower  against  civilian  employers  mostly  thanks  to  four  elements:  first, 
the  competitive  set  of  benefits  offered  to  reenlisted  soldiers;  secondly,  the 
youngsters'  patriotic  enthusiasm  because  of  the  unexpected  unification; 
thirdly,  the  tendency  to  consider  draftee  replacement  and  commodifying 
the  labor  force  as  legitimate  economic  strategies;  and,  fourthly,  the  lack 
of  alternative  job  opportunities  for  ex-draftees,  especially  craftsmen  and 
clerks.  By  the  second  half  of  the  1870s  all  these  conditions  had  changed  and 
military  careers  increasingly  lost  their  appeal.  Consequently,  the  govern- 
ment decided  (or  was  forced?)  to  base  the  post-1870  army  upon  unfree 
labor,  i.e.,  exclusively  upon  thousands  of  conscripts  forced  to  look  at  the 
army  as  a  "second  family"118  and  fight  for  the  only  legitimate  reason:  help- 
ing the  nation  to  win  the  Darwinian  struggle  for  survival.  After  Ricotti's 
reform  had  forbidden  the  corps  to  hire  men  on  behalf  of  rich  draftees,  the 
only  form  of  volunteerism  in  the  Italian  army  was  represented  by  one-year 
volunteers.  However,  as  mentioned  above,  most  one-year  volunteers  were 
not  "true  volunteers";  instead  they  were  a  privileged  group  of  conscripts 

118  Ministero  della  Guerra,  Regolamento  di disciplina  mititare  deli,  dicembre  7872,  article  9,  §  39. 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


515 


who  enlisted  as  volunteers  simply  in  order  to  make  their  military  service 
easier  and  shorter. 

Again,  a  standard  taxonomy  is  misleading  when  mechanically  applied 
to  the  different  types  of  man  who  enlisted  in  the  Italian  army,  particularly 
to  volunteers.  Actually,  voluntary  and  forced  labor  continued  to  be  inter- 
mingled until  the  eve  of  World  War  I. 

Conclusions 

This  brief  overview  of  the  Italian  conscription  experience  suggests  the 
necessity  of  prudence  in  applying  tricky  concepts,  such  as  "universal  con- 
scription", "volunteer",  and  "draftee".  On  the  one  hand,  different  phenomena 
risk  being  erroneously  confused  under  the  vague  label  of  "conscript  army". 
On  the  other  hand,  the  shift  from  the  pre-unification  professional-dynastic 
militia  toward  the  national  conscript  army  risks  being  wrongly  regarded 
as  a  linear  progression. 

Actually,  the  wide  range  of  draft  systems  operating  on  the  peninsula 
(both  synchronously  and  diachronically)  shows  that  conscription  is  the 
product  of  a  constant  and  dialectic  process  which  involves  the  draftees  and 
the  state.  On  the  one  side,  the  state  tried  to  make  the  opposing  needs  of 
political  and  military  authorities  compatible.  On  the  other  side,  conscripts 
react  actively  to  their  military  obligation.  In  so  doing,  draftees  contributed 
to  shaping  conscription  laws  and  practices,  since  their  resistance  forced 
the  central  power  both  to  repress  the  extreme  expressions  of  refusal  and 
to  compromise,  by  granting  some  return,  material  or  otherwise,  for  the 
draftees'  peaceful  acceptance  of  their  military  duty. 

Naturally,  the  outcome  of  this  negotiation  depends  mostly  on  the  state's 
contractual  power.  Long-  and  short-term  factors  (the  lack  of  financial 
resources,  infrastructure,  and  efficient  bureaucracy,  etc.)  can  undermine 
the  state's  ability  to  impose  its  authority  over  the  entire  country  and  to  put 
its  conscription  policy  in  practice  exactly  as  had  been  planned.  In  such 
disadvantaged  conditions,  conscription  can  help  the  ruling  class  construct 
a  centralized  state  that  can  effectively  impose  its  authority  on  its  subjects 
-  but  it  is  also  a  very  dangerous  issue.  Actually,  drafting  men  from  uncon- 
trolled provinces  is  similar  to  committing  the  two  most  important  elements 
of  modern  "stateness"  -  the  monopoly  of  legitimate  violence  and  the  right 
to  defend  the  territory  from  external  threats  -  to  unreliable  people,  both 
military  and  politically.  In  these  cases,  a  "conscript  army"  tends  to  become 


516 


MARCO  ROVINELLO 


nothing  more  than  a  legal  framework  for  different  forms  of  recruitment 
whose  major  aim  is  to  select  recruits  according  to  the  ruling  class's  interests. 

Italy  in  the  1860s  was  a  perfect  example  of  this.  Soon  after  unification,  the 
liberal  government  introduced  the  draft  into  every  annexed  land  in  order  to 
enforce  its  control  over  the  new  provinces  and  to  prevent  any  external  threat 
to  its  independence.  Nevertheless,  the  ruling  class  reduced  the  risk  of  arm- 
ing untrustworthy  men  by  making  conscription  not  genuinely  universal.  In 
other  words,  in  the  first  decade  after  unification,  the  government  needed  its 
own  citizens  but  it  did  not  trust  most  of  them.  La  Marmora's  draft  system 
was  the  solution  to  this  dilemma.  In  fact,  recruiting  the  Italian  nation 
according  to  Piedmont  draft  law  was  the  cornerstone  of  the  government's 
strategy  to  keep  the  loyalty  of  the  newborn  militia  under  control. 

On  the  one  hand,  substitution  and  liberation  enabled  the  military  authori- 
ties to  prevent  anti-monarchy  and  anti-unification  feelings  from  eroding 
the  core  of  the  monarchic  power  by  funding  -  through  the  replacement 
fees  -  the  enlistment  of  reliable  substitutes  instead  of  potentially  disloyal 
draftees.  Besides,  in  1860s  Europe,  buying  oneself  out  of  military  duty  was 
still  considered  to  be  morally  legitimate  by  public  opinion.  Similarly,  hiring 
a  commodified  military  labor  force  was  largely  accepted,  especially  in 
those  countries  -  such  as  Italy  -  where  employment  conditions  in  the  army 
were  decent,  and  official  rhetoric  described  reenlistment  as  a  profitable 
employment  opportunity  for  jobless  and  poor  men. 

On  the  other  hand,  long-term  service  enabled  officers  to  transform 
draftees  into  disciplined  soldiers  and  loyal  Savoy  subjects.  Moreover,  a  five- 
year-long  absence  from  the  civilian  world  led  many  conscripts  to  revise  their 
plans,  and  "voluntarily"  reenroll  because  of  a  lack  of  alternatives.  Although 
it  is  very  difficult  to  state  the  reason  why  more  than  1,000  males  reenlisted 
every  year,  these  features  of  the  draft  help  us  explain  how  the  army  could 
be  competitive  in  the  struggle  for  unskilled  labor,  despite  budgetary  con- 
straints. Moreover,  it  shows  to  what  extent  a  sharp  distinction  between  free 
and  unfree  military  labor  was  misleading  in  nineteenth-century  Italy.  Any 
taxonomy  must  be  carefully  used. 

After  1870,  the  fulfillment  of  the  unification  process  led  the  government 
to  modify  the  aims  of  conscription  from  state-building  to  nation-building. 
In  peacetime,  "making  the  Italians"  became  the  first  goal  of  military  service, 
and  a  German-style  draft  system  was  set  up  to  achieve  this  aim.  In  fact, 
Ricotti's  new  recruitment  law  looked  much  like  the  German  one:  military 
service  became  a  personal  obligation,  the  service  term  was  halved,  and 
liberation  and  ordinary  substitution  were  replaced  by  "one-year  volunteer- 
ism".  Naturally,  the  reform  affected  several  variables  of  post-1875  military 


THE  DRAFT  AND  DRAFTEES  IN  ITALY,  1861-1914 


517 


labor:  duration,  income,  and  legal  constraints  at  least.  Briefly,  voluntary 
enlistment  was  no  longer  either  a  profitable  employment  or  a  mechanism 
for  upward  mobility. 

However,  the  new  conscription's  most  significant  effect  on  labor  relations 
in  the  military  was  ideological.  In  particular,  the  abolition  of  liberation  not 
only  prevented  the  army  from  employing  ex-draftees  as  substitutes,  but 
also  delegitimized  the  commodification  of  labor  force  in  itself.  Escaping 
military  service  by  paying  a  tax  was  considered  more  and  more  a  sign  of  the 
draftees'  unjustifiable  indifference  to  the  destiny  of  the  fatherland.  At  the 
same  time,  replacing  liberated  men  was  more  and  more  seen  as  an  immoral 
way  to  earn  money  from  helping  those  reluctant  "Italian  brothers"  avoid 
fulfilling  their  own  obligations  to  the  national  community. 

Consequently,  starting  from  the  early  1870s,  the  idea  that  lower  ranks 
should  be  military  professionals  lost  its  legitimacy  and  the  army  in  the  main 
stopped  employing  free  and  commodified  labor  force  instead  of  draftees. 
Serving  in  the  military  became  a  personal  mission  that  men  had  to  ac- 
complish in  the  name  of  the  natural  brotherhood  of  countrymen,  rather 
than  a  job  to  be  performed  by  professionals. 

In  conclusion,  the  Italian  case  study  suggests  that  the  features  of  the 
draft  systems  mostly  depend  on  political  issues.  An  exemption  system, 
replacement,  liberation,  and  voluntary  enlistment  are  the  most  common 
means  through  which  the  ruling  class  keeps  the  sociological  composition 
and  the  political  reliability  of  the  army  under  control.  Technical  arguments 
are  usually  used  by  the  government  to  justify  its  military  policies,  but  they 
actually  do  not  deeply  influence  the  choices  concerning  the  draft. 

Similarly,  ideological  issues  -  particularly  those  connected  with 
nation-building  -  affect  the  draft.  Charging  the  army  with  the  task  of 
nation-building  produces  significant  changes  in  draft  practices  not  only 
in  technical  terms  (the  length  of  service,  the  size  of  the  annual  call-up,  etc.), 
but  also  in  the  official  ideological  justification  of  the  draft,  in  the  meaning 
of  military  obligation,  and  in  the  legitimacy  of  commodifying  military 
labor.  A  strong  ideological  link  is  established  between  military  service, 
citizenship,  and  national  identity.  The  Italian  draft  after  1870  would  be  not 
understandable  outside  this  ideological  framework. 

Economic  factors  also  played  an  important  role.  In  particular,  budget- 
ary constraints  affected  the  Italian  draft  in  two  ways.  On  the  one  hand, 
they  fixed  the  number  of  conscripts  effectively  enlisted.  On  the  other, 
they  limited  the  competitiveness  of  the  army  in  the  struggle  against  other 
employers  for  the  labor  force. 


Conversely,  the  demographic  issue  is  a  much  less  influential  factor,  as  the 
Italian  population  largely  overwhelmed  the  recruitment  needs.  If  anything, 
the  sudden  availability  of  new  population  after  unification  represents  a 
problem  for  the  Piedmontese  military  authorities,  since  it  reduced  the 
percentage  of  politically  reliable  draftees  and  supplied  the  new  national 
army  with  very  few  further  reliable  volunteers.  Supply  on  the  military  labor 
market  cannot  be  measured  simply  by  quantifying  the  eligible  volunteers. 
The  employer's  political  and  regional  prejudices  against  some  of  the  avail- 
able "employees"  reduces  the  supply  of  labor  on  the  market  in  reality. 

Verifying  to  what  extent  the  nineteenth-century  Italian  conscription 
experience  shares  these  features  with  other  draft  systems  is  the  reason  why 
this  case  study  has  been  involved  in  an  ambitious  diachronic  and  global 
comparison,  the  Fighting  for  a  Living  project. 


Nation-building,  war  experiences,  and 
European  models 


The  rejection  of  conscription  in  Britain 
Jiirn  Leonhard 

At  the  crossroads  of  state-building,  nation-building,  and  war 
experiences:  the  evolution  of  the  model  of  a  nation-in-arms 

The  evolution  of  nations  and  nation-states  was  linked  with  experiences  of 
war.1  The  long  process  of  external  and  internal  state-building  was  a  history 
of  warfare  and  its  revolutionary  impacts.  Most  of  the  numerous  territorial 
states  of  the  early  modern  period  did  not  survive  this  violent  restructuring 
of  Europe.  Between  the  last  third  of  the  eighteenth  century  and  the  end 
of  the  nineteenth  century  the  number  decreased  from  about  500  states 
around  1500  to  about  20  around  1900.  State-building,  so  much  intensified 
between  1794  and  1815,  was  directly  linked  to  the  experience  of  wars,  and  the 
British  war-state  of  the  eighteenth  century  is  a  particular  illustration  of  this 
fundamental  aspect  of  modern  history.2  As  a  part  of  this  complex  process, 
justifications  of  war  changed,  pointing  to  the  new  meaning  of  nation  and 
nation-state  as  dominant  paradigms  of  political  and  social  legitimacy.3 

But  war  not  only  accompanied  the  external  processes  of  state-building. 
It  also  represented,  from  the  1750s  onwards,  a  possible  means  of  political 
emancipation  and  participation  and  hence  became  part  of  internal  nation- 
building:  this  is  why  the  modern  concept  of  conscription  is  such  a  powerful 
analytical  tool.  War  changed  its  character:  from  being  merely  dynastic 
affairs,  and  cabinet  wars,  fought  with  hired  mercenaries  from  different 
countries  who  did  not  identify  with  an  abstract  notion  of  the  nation,  to 
wars  fought,  in  theory  at  least,  in  the  name  of  the  whole  nation  and  by 
the  whole  nation-in-arms.  On  the  one  hand,  and  from  the  last  third  of 

1  See  Leonhard,  Bellizismus  unci  Nation,  "Nation-States  and  Wars";  see  the  chapters  by  Frevert, 
Jaun,  Strachan,  Forster,  and  Beyrau  in  Frevert,  Militdrund  Gesellschaftim  ig.  undio.fahrhundert, 
pp.  17-142;  for  the  German  case,  see  the  chapters  by  Schmidt,  Carl,  and  Buschmann  in  Langewi- 
esche  and  Schmidt,  Fdderative  Nation,  pp.  33-111. 

2  See  Brewer,  The  Sinews  of  Power. 

3  See  Tilly,  The  Formation  of  National  States  in  Western  Europe,  "Reflections  on  the  History 
of  European  State-Making",  p.  42,  "States  and  Nationalism  in  Europe  1492-1992". 


520 


JORN  LEONHARD 


the  eighteenth  century,  new  forms  of  "national  wars"  or  "people's  wars", 
in  particular  the  American  War  of  Independence  and  then  the  French 
revolutionary  wars  after  1792,  meant  that  more  groups  of  society  were  now 
directly  affected  by  war.  Warfare  based  upon  mass  armies  and  collective 
conscription  transcended  the  traditional  separation  of  the  civilian  popula- 
tion from  the  direct  experience  of  violent  conflict,  as  had  been  the  aim  of 
traditional  cabinet  wars  since  the  mid-seventeenth  century,  fought  in  the 
name  of  monarchical,  dynastic,  and  territorial  interests,  and  avoiding  at 
the  same  time  the  horrors  of  civil  war  as  they  had  been  experienced  in  the 
confessional  wars  of  the  seventeenth  century 4  On  the  other  hand,  national 
wars  strengthened  the  state  as  the  only  legitimate  institution  which  could 
provide  the  financial  and  military  means  of  warfare. 

A  war  fought  in  the  name  of  the  entire  nation  provoked  hitherto  un- 
known expectations  of  political  and  social  participation.  That  became 
obvious  in  the  course  of  the  later  eighteenth  century,  and  it  became  an 
essential  aspect  of  the  new  concept  of  a  nation-in-arms  which  also  formed 
the  ideological  basis  of  conscription.  The  ambivalence  of  war  -  externally 
as  a  form  of  collective  aggression  and  violence  and,  internally,  as  a  means  of 
participation  -  already  played  a  major  role  in  contemporary  war  discourses 
and  controversies  over  the  precise  meaning  and  possible  justification  of 
war.5  Thus,  the  concept  of  civil  war,  so  dominant  in  the  critical  periods  of 
the  seventeenth  century  with  its  religious  conflicts  in  various  European 
societies,  found  its  way  back  into  justifications  of  war  after  1750.  But,  in 
contrast  to  the  seventeenth  century,  it  was  now  no  longer  a  civil  war  caused 
by  confessional  conflicts,  but  fought  in  the  light  of  the  secular  concepts 
of  liberty  and  equality  as  derived  from  the  philosophy  of  human  rights. 
Already  in  the  1760s  the  French  philosopher  Abbe  de  Mably  described  the 
expansionist  wars  of  the  eighteenth  century  as  the  natural  consequence 
of  monarchical  despotism.  This  justified  a  new  and  international  civil 
war  of  all  suppressed  peoples  against  their  monarchical  oppressors.  Mably 
regarded  such  an  international  civil  war  as  a  "bien",  legitimizing  in  this 
context  the  "nation  militaire".6 

During  the  French  Revolution  and  the  subsequent  wars  from  1792  to 
1815  such  ideas  assumed  a  new  meaning.  However,  the  wars  of  this  period 

4  See  Munkler,  Uber  den  Krieg,  pp.  53-55,  75-77;  for  the  state  of  German  research,  see  Ech- 
ternkamp  and  Miiller,  Die  Politik  der  Nation;  Rosener,  Staat  und  Krieg;  Wolfrum,  Krieg  und 
Frieden  in  der Neuzeit,  pp.  49-51,  66-68,  95-97. 

5  Forrest,  "The  Nation  in  Arms  I";  French,  "The  Nation  in  Arms  II";  see  also  Kunisch,  Staats- 
verfassung  und Heeresverfassung  in  der  europdischen,  Furst  -  Gesellschaft  -  Krieg. 

6  Mably,  Des  droits  et  des  devoirs  du  citoyen,  pp.  93-94. 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


521 


demonstrated  that  the  paradigm  of  an  international  and  revolutionary  civil 
war  of  all  suppressed  peoples  against  their  despotic  suppressors  was  soon 
replaced  by  national  wars  between  distinct  states.  Conflicts  from  the  1790s 
onwards  stood  between  the  practice  of  traditional  cabinet  or  state  wars  that 
had  characterized  European  history  since  the  end  of  the  Thirty  Years  War 
and  a  new  ideological  concept  of  civil  war  in  the  name  of  abstract  principles 
among  which  the  paradigm  of  the  nation  became  most  prominent.7 

The  complexity  of  war  experiences  became  more  obvious  over  the  course 
of  the  nineteenth  century:  on  the  one  hand,  the  wars  of  the  nineteenth 
century  were  in  many  ways  still  fought  according  to  the  rules  of  tradi- 
tional cabinet  wars,  although  the  wars  of  the  1860s  clearly  showed  signs 
of  transformation  from  Clausewitz's  "absolute  war"  into  "total  war".8  On 
the  other  hand,  these  wars  reflected,  in  theory  at  least,  each  individual 
fighter's  identification  with  a  more  abstract  notion  of  nationality  and  na- 
tion. This  justification  of  war  was  clearly  a  legacy  of  the  civil  war  paradigm, 
as  revived  through  experiences  in  America  and  France  from  the  last  third 
of  the  eighteenth  century.  If  the  contemporary  concept  of  "national  war" 
pointed  already  to  the  connection  between  the  citizens'  duty  to  defend  the 
fatherland  and  their  recognition  as  politically  participating  subjects,  then 
the  "people's  war"  transcended  this  connotation  even  further.9  Already 
during  the  1760s  and  1770s  many  American  writers  had  referred  to  the  war 
against  the  British  as  a  "people's  war",  representing  a  people's  ability  to 
organize  and  mobilize  its  military  in  the  absence  of  a  monarchical  state 
and  at  the  same  time  challenging  the  traditional  state's  monopoly  of  arms 
on  violence.10  In  France  the  prospect  of  a  revolutionary  people's  war  was 
also  perceived  as  a  potential  threat  by  the  new  revolutionary  regimes  after 
1792.  The  regimes  therefore  responded  with  deliberate  attempts  to  control 
and  channel  this  development. 

In  the  course  of  the  nineteenth  century,  the  invention  of  the  new 
nation-in-arms  generated  distinct  forms  of  warfare.  Three  ideal  types  can 
be  distinguished:  first,  guerrilla  warfare  stood  for  the  ideal  type  of  people's 
war.  Following  the  collapse  of  a  state's  authority,  it  was  the  population  which 
in  this  case  organized  and  carried  out  military  actions,  not  in  traditional 
battles  but  rather  in  small,  individual  actions,  exemplified  by  the  Spanish 
guerrilla  war  against  Napoleonic  regular  troops  in  1808.  Second,  militia 

7  See  Kunisch  and  Miinkler,  Die  Wiedergeburt  des Krieges  aus  clem  Geist  der Revolution. 

8  Clausewitz,  "Vom  Kriege  (1832/34)",  pp.  318-319. 

9  Wohlfeil,  "Der  Volkskrieg  im  Zeitalter  Napoleons". 

10  Ramsay,  The  History  of  the  American  Revolution,  I,  p.  325. 


522 


JORN  LEONHARD 


armies  combined  the  two  principles  of  voluntary  service  with  those  of  state 
control  and  professional  military  leadership  in  order  to  fight  larger  battles 
and  to  use  the  mass  mobilization  of  nations-in-arms.  The  American  War  of 
Independence  as  well  as  the  early  years  of  the  French  revolutionary  wars 
after  1792  provide  examples  for  this  type.  Third,  mass  conscript  armies 
represented  the  attempt  to  fully  control  and  regulate  a  people's  mobilization 
for  war.  It  provided  the  military  and  fiscal  state  with  enormous  resources 
of  power.  The  principle  of  conscription  as  a  means  of  defending  the  whole 
nation  also  justified  the  use  of  force  necessary  to  overcome  popular  resist- 
ance against  the  rigors  of  compulsory  military  service.  France  (during 
the  Napoleonic  Empire)  and  Prussia  (from  the  early  nineteenth  century 
onwards)  exemplified  this  type.11 

However,  mass  conscription  did  not  mean  an  equal  share  of  the  burden 
of  military  service.  Despite  the  myth  of  the  revolutionary  citizen-soldier, 
the  French  system  allowed  many  exemptions,  and  the  Napoleonic  armies 
were  far  from  mass  conscript  armies  integrating  the  whole  nation-in-arms. 
Prussia,  during  the  anti-Napoleonic  wars,  came  much  closer  to  the  ideal 
of  mass  conscription  without  exemptions.  Yet  in  contrast  to  France,  the 
Prussian  military  reforms  under  Gerhard  von  Scharnhorst  and  August 
Neidhardt  von  Gneisenau  never  resulted  in  a  realistic  promise  of  political 
participation  in  return  for  military  service.12  After  the  end  of  the  Napoleonic 
Wars,  European  governments  were  keen  to  return  to  professional  armies 
which  were  regarded  as  safer  tools  against  the  revolutionary  contagion  of 
arming  the  people.  France  and  the  German  states  after  1815  were  particular 
examples  of  this  development.  It  was  only  in  the  context  of  further  military 
reforms  and  against  the  background  of  industrialization  after  1850  that 
conscription  became  an  option  again,  as  the  European  wars  in  the  1850s, 
1860s,  and  early  1870s  demonstrated.  However,  the  examples  of  1859, 1866, 
and  1870-1871  also  exemplified  the  advantages  of  short  military  operations 
which  did  not  force  societies  to  fully  mobilize  the  nation-in-arms  and  which 
tried  to  avoid  the  combination  of  revolution  and  war.  Only  in  the  case  of  the 
American  Civil  War  from  1861  to  1865  did  mass  conscription  really  develop 
the  means  of  modern  warfare  with  all  its  disastrous  consequences.13 

11  Forster,  "Vom  Volkskrieg  zum  totalen  Krieg?",  pp.  78-79;  on  conscription  in  general,  see  Ki- 
ernan,  "Conscription  and  Society  in  Europe  before  the  War  of  1914-18";  Foerster,  Die  Wehrpflicht; 
Forster,  "Militar  und  staatsbiirgerliche  Partizipation";  Levi,  "The  Institution  of  Conscription"; 
Frevert,  Die  kasernierte  Nation;  Flynn,  Conscription  and  Democracy;  Moran  and  Waldron,  The 
People  in  Arms. 

12  Frevert,  "Das  jakobinische  Modell",  p.  26. 

13  Forster  and  Nagler,  On  the  Road  to  Total  War. 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


523 


In  these  wars  of  the  later  nineteenth  century,  particular  elements  of 
total  warfare  became  obvious,  although  "total  war"  with  its  new  industrial 
character  and  hitherto  unknown  numbers  of  victims  did  not  become  a 
collective  experience  in  Europe  until  1914.  Yet  already  the  wars  of  the  second 
half  of  the  century  -  the  Crimean  War,  but  in  particular  the  American  Civil 
War  between  1861  and  1865  and  the  Wars  of  German  Unification  between 
1864  and  1871  -  pointed  to  a  transformation  in  the  meaning  of  war  and  the 
changing  character  of  modern  warfare:  this  was  essentially  characterized 
by  a  new  combination  of  technological  progress,  based  upon  increased 
firepower  and  railway  transport,  and  mass  mobilization  in  the  name  of 
an  abstract  ideal  of  nationality  and  nation-state.  The  state's  financial, 
economic,  and  military  means  to  achieve  its  aims  reached  a  peak.  This  new 
dimension  of  mobilization  also  necessitated  a  new  ideological  justification 
of  war.  War  was  no  longer  regarded  as  a  conflict  over  territory  or  dynastic 
interests,  but  it  was  fought  for  the  ultimate  existence  of  nations  and  peoples. 
This  necessitated  the  stigmatization  of  the  enemy  and  the  overcoming  of  the 
traditional  separation  between  a  state's  armies  and  its  people.  This  essential 
distinction  between  the  military  and  the  civic  sphere  became  questioned, 
as  illustrated  by  both  the  actions  of  the  North  American  General  William 
Sherman  in  the  Southern  states  of  the  Confederation  during  the  American 
Civil  War  and,  on  a  lower  level  of  collective  violence,  the  popular  warfare 
of  the  French  against  the  German  invaders  after  September  1870. 

It  was  the  intensive  interaction  between  war  and  nation-building  from 
the  eighteenth  century  that  generated  the  ideal  notion  of  a  nation-in-arms. 
It  included  at  the  same  time  the  new  ideal  of  the  politically  participating 
citizen  as  the  natural  defender  of  the  fatherland  and  hence  a  resurgence 
of  the  civil  war  paradigm  against  the  idea  of  cabinet  wars,  separating  the 
military  sphere  from  that  of  civil  society.  From  that  point  of  view,  the 
perceived  national  character  of  conflicts  after  1792  instigated  civic  connota- 
tions of  citizenship  and  political  expectations,  and  participation  through 
conscription  was  the  most  obvious  of  these.  If  the  model  of  a  nation-in-arms 
marked  the  beginning  of  a  long-term  process  toward  a  radicalization  of  both 
national  self-images  and  images  of  the  enemy,  thereby  integrating  many 
ethnic  connotations  focusing  on  belligerent  myths  and  military  memories, 
it  was  at  the  same  time  an  ideal  type  of  definition:  not  even  the  often  quoted 
examples  of  Prussia  in  the  1860s,  Germany  after  1871,  or  France  after  1871 
ever  implemented  a  conscription  that  encompassed  the  complete  nation.14 

14  Frevert,  "Das  jakobinische  Modell",  pp.  42-47;  Krumeich,  "Zur  Entwicklung  der  'nation 
armee'  in  Frankreich",  "The  Myth  of  Gambetta  and  the  "People's  War"  in  Germany  and  France". 


524 


JORN  LEONHARD 


It  was  the  experience  of  World  War  I  with  hitherto  unknown  numbers  of 
victims  that  fundamentally  challenged  for  the  concept  of  a  loyal  nation- 
in-arms.15 

This  chapter  tries  to  reconstruct  the  particular  case  of  conscription  in 
Britain,  taking  into  account  the  British  discussion  of  military  models  in 
Europe  since  the  last  third  of  the  nineteenth  century.  In  view  of  a  European 
comparison,  the  reasons  why  conscription  was  rejected  in  Britain  for  such 
a  long  period  have  to  be  identified.  In  comparison  with  both  continental 
nation-states  and  empires  such  as  tsarist  Russia,  the  Habsburg  monarchy, 
and  the  Ottoman  Empire,  which  introduced  conscript  legislation,  Britain 
did  so  only  during  World  War  I  in  1916  when  in  the  context  of  industrialized 
warfare  the  number  of  volunteers  no  longer  met  the  military  demands 
of  the  western  front.  In  the  first  part,  fundamental  premises  about  the 
relationship  between  the  British  military,  society,  and  empire  are  discussed. 
The  second  part  concentrates  on  the  changing  image  of  the  British  military, 
the  contemporary  perception  of  continental  warfare,  and  the  concept  of  a 
nation-in-arms  since  the  1870s.  Third,  I  will  look  more  closely  at  the  meaning 
of  the  Boer  War  in  that  context.  Finally,  in  a  brief  overview,  I  discuss  the 
complexities  of  imperial  defense  before  1914  and  the  empire's  role  for  Britain 
in  World  War  I. 

Military,  society,  and  empire:  some  British  peculiarities 

In  a  classical  liberal  statement  on  the  British  Empire,  Sir  Henry  Campbell- 
Bannerman  in  1903  stated  "that  we  cannot  provide  for  a  fighting  empire, 
and  nothing  will  give  us  the  power.  A  peaceful  empire  of  the  old  type  we  are 
quite  fit  for."16  Against  the  background  of  Britain's  painful  experiences  dur- 
ing the  Boer  War  he  formulated  a  fundamental  problem  which  affected  the 
British  Empire  and  also  anticipated  future  challenges:  how  could  Britain's 
traditional  military  structure  be  reconciled  with  the  realities  of  military 
conflict  within  the  British  Empire?  How  was  Britain  to  respond  to  the 
new  concept  of  a  nation-in-arms,  which  had  decided  the  outcome  of  the 
European  wars  of  1866  and  1870-1871  and  was  more  and  more  regarded 
as  a  precondition  for  the  political  survival  of  great  powers  in  a  period  of 
increased  international  competition? 

15  Chickering  and  Forster,  Great  War,  Total  War. 

16  Quoted  in  Spender,  The  Life  of  Sir  Henry  Campbell  Bannerman,  II,  p.  88;  see  Holland,  "The 
British  Empire  and  the  Great  War",  p.  114. 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


525 


In  stark  contrast  to  continental  European  societies,  Britain  in  the  second 
half  of  the  century  did  not  witness  a  debate  over  national  and  people's  wars, 
such  as  developed  in  Germany,  France,  and  Italy,  or  in  the  United  States 
during  the  American  Civil  War.  Whenever  these  concepts  were  used  in  Brit- 
ish discourse,  they  referred  to  countries  other  than  Britain.17  Already  this 
symptom  points  to  particular  differences  between  war  experiences  and  the 
meaning  of  the  military  on  the  continent  and  across  the  Channel.  Histori- 
cally, Britain's  geographical  position  without  direct  neighbors  allowed  it  to 
rely  on  a  relatively  small  professional  army.  Even  before  1914  its  planned  size 
was  less  than  a  quarter  of  that  of  most  continental  armies.18  Furthermore, 
large  standing  armies  had  always  been  regarded  as  symbols  of  absolutist 
despotism.  But  in  contrast  to  the  continent  where,  as  a  consequence  of 
the  religious  wars  of  the  seventeenth  century,  princes  and  dynasties  had 
established  absolutist  rule  on  the  basis  of  standing  armies,  the  absolutist 
experiment  had  failed  in  Britain  with  the  end  of  the  Stuarts  in  1688.  The 
Whig  interpretation  of  these  conflicts  and  its  continuous  influence  in  the 
early  nineteenth  century  provided  ample  room  for  the  identification  of 
standing  armies  with  absolutist,  potentially  Catholic,  and  therefore  un- 
English  principles. 

When  confronted  with  increased  and  intensified  armament  programs 
and  the  introduction  of  mass  conscription  in  other  European  nation-states, 
discussions  in  Britain  after  1870  did  not  focus  primarily  on  a  conscript 
army.  Even  Lord  Roberts,  the  popular  president  of  the  National  Service 
League,  did  not  demand  a  mass  conscript  army  but  favored  specific  military 
units  capable  of  defending  the  island  of  Britain  in  case  of  an  invasion.19 
There  was  no  equivalent  to  the  continental  experience  which,  as  in  the 
French  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic  Wars  before  1815,  and  during  the 
conflicts  that  developed  in  the  course  of  nation-state-building  in  Italy  and 
Germany  from  the  late  1850s  to  the  early  1870s,  had  catalyzed  discourses 
about  the  changing  meaning  and  justification  of  war.  In  addition,  the  British 
perception  of  the  American  Civil  War  seemed  to  underline  that  British 
society  was  far  from  becoming  a  military  nation.  Thus  the  concepts  of  a 
nation-in-arms  and  a  people's  war  retained  a  foreign  connotation  which 
in  the  eyes  of  contemporaries  could  be  applied  neither  to  Britain's  present 
situation  nor  to  its  history. 

17  Strachan,  "Militar,  Empire  und  Civil  Society";  Paris,  Warrior  Nation. 

18  Spiers,  The  Army  and  Society. 

19  Adams  and  Poirer,  The  Conscription  Controversy  in  Great  Britain,  pp.  16-18;  Roberts,  Defence 
of  the  Empire. 


526 


JORN  LEONHARD 


Furthermore,  and  distinct  from  the  ideal  of  a  nation-in-arms  accord- 
ing to  which  all  groups  of  society  should  at  least  in  theory  be  trained  to 
defend  the  fatherland,  the  British  army  for  a  long  time  was  regarded  as  a 
microcosm  of  rural  society.  According  to  this  view,  officers  were  recruited 
from  the  landed  aristocracy  and  gentry  Together  with  volunteer  soldiers 
from  the  countryside,  they  represented,  in  the  eyes  of  contemporaries,  the 
uncorrupted  virtues  of  the  nonindustrial  sectors  of  British  society.  In  the 
British  Army  of  the  early  nineteenth  century,  "multiethnicity"  referred  to  the 
disproportionally  high  numbers  of  Scottish  and  Irish  soldiers  fighting  in  the 
British  forces.20  Originally,  only  Protestants  could  serve  as  soldiers  or  officers 
in  the  crown's  armed  forces.  However,  the  empire's  rapid  expansion  during 
the  eighteenth  century  as  well  as  the  military's  development  in  general  neces- 
sitated the  recruitment  of  Irish  Catholics.  Already  in  the  1770s  enlistment  of 
Irish  Catholics  had  started.  Very  soon  large  numbers  were  recruited  for  the 
marines  and  especially  for  the  East  India  Company's  army.21  By  the  time  of 
the  Indian  Mutiny,  nearly  50  per  cent  of  the  Company's  army  of  14,000  soldiers 
were  Irish,  and  40  per  cent  of  the  26,000  British  troops  in  India  were  Irish, 
mostly  recruited  from  poor  Catholic  families.  The  fundamental  role  played  by 
Irish  regiments  in  putting  down  the  Sepoy  Mutiny  revealed  to  many  British 
people  the  extent  of  the  Irish  presence  in  India.22  An  Anglo-Irish  officer 
corps  developed,  playing  a  role  out  of  proportion  to  their  numbers  in  the 
British  army  in  the  nineteenth  century.  They  accounted  for  approximately 
17  per  cent  of  all  officers  in  the  British  armed  forces,  and  at  least  30  per  cent 
of  all  officers  serving  in  India.  Whereas  most  of  the  Irish  soldiers  serving  in 
the  British  armed  forces  were  Catholics,  the  officers  were  mainly  recruited 
from  Protestant  lower  gentry  families  who  sought  careers  for  their  sons.23 

Traditional  interpretations  of  the  British  army  in  the  nineteenth  century 
have  highlighted  that  it  was  this  constellation  that  prevented  any  military 
professionalization  by  adhering  to  an  amateur  ideal  of  gentleman-officers 
and  peasant-soldiers.24  But  in  the  light  of  more  recent  research,  this  point  of 
view  needs  a  closer  look.  In  comparison  with  France,  Germany,  and  Italy,  it 
was  not  the  concept  of  the  national  wars  or  people's  wars  of  1859-1861, 1864, 
1866,  and  1870-1871  that  dominated  contemporary  war  discourses  in  Britain, 

20  Henderson,  Highland  Soldier. 

21  Bartlett,  "Ireland,  Empire,  and  Union,  1690-1801",  pp.  73-74. 

22  Bartlett,  "The  Irish  Soldier  in  India,  1750-1947";  Kenny,  "The  Irish  in  the  Empire",  pp.  104-105. 

23  Kenny,  "The  Irish  in  the  Empire",  pp.  106-107;  Bartlett,  "The  Irish  Soldier  in  India,  1750-1947", 
pp.  20-21. 

24  Strachan,  "Militar,  Empire  und  Civil  Society",  p.  79;  see  also  Beckett,  The  Amateur  Military 
Tradition. 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


527 


but  the  "small  wars"  that  accompanied  the  expansion  of  the  British  Empire.25 
Throughout  the  long  nineteenth  century,  Britain  was  engaged  in  more  or  less 
constant  military  actions  in  its  colonies,  and  these  war  experiences  were 
certainly  distinct  from  the  national  wars  on  the  continent  between  1848 
and  1871.  It  was  also  in  this  context  that  the  army's  image  as  a  microcosm 
of  rural  Britain  came  to  be  challenged.  The  military  crisis  that  the  British 
faced  in  the  Boer  War,  in  the  eyes  of  many  contemporary  observers,  seemed 
to  be  the  result  of  the  social  degeneration  of  officers  and  soldiers,  due  to 
urbanization  and  industrialization  in  the  British  motherland.26  The  experi- 
ence of  imperial  warfare  thus  led  to  a  new  and  critical  assessment  of  British 
industrial  society's  modernity  and  its  price. 

As  a  result  of  the  colonial  small  wars,  it  was  not  only  the  political  role 
of  the  army  that  changed,  but  also  its  social  composition,  with  decreasing 
numbers  of  officers  recruited  from  the  landed  gentry  and  aristocracy.  The 
army  as  a  whole  became  more  urban  and,  in  contrast  to  the  ideal  of  Irish, 
Scottish,  and  Welsh  soldiers,  also  more  English.27  This  was  not  a  multieth- 
nic conscript  army  meant  to  integrate  the  many  different  ethnic  groups 
within  the  empire.  Multiethnicity  in  this  context  did  not  primarily  refer 
to  language  but  to  a  notion  of  Otherness  as  it  had  historically  developed 
in  the  different  regions  of  the  British  Isles.  The  expectation  that  the  army 
had  to  play  a  fundamental  role  in  keeping  the  empire  together  was  instead 
derived  from  a  different  collective  image  that  was  identified  with  the  armed 
forces.  According  to  this  image,  the  army  was  itself  a  symbol  of  the  union 
with  its  high  proportion  of  Irish  and  Scottish  soldiers  and  officers.  At  the 
same  time  the  union  was  regarded  as  the  very  center  of  the  British  Empire. 
Hence  the  army's  role  for  the  union  could  not  be  separated  from  that  for 
the  empire,  as  the  Irish  case  demonstrated. 

In  order  to  understand  this  change  in  public  perception  of  the  military, 
the  change  in  the  liberals'  attitude  toward  army  and  war  needs  to  be  taken 
into  consideration.  For  a  long  time  historians  used  to  point  to  the  antagonism 
between  Gladstonian  liberalism  and  its  focus  on  Home  Rule  for  Ireland 
on  the  one  hand,  and  the  army  as  a  symbol  of  the  union  under  English 
dominance  on  the  other.  This  relation  changed  fundamentally  in  the  later 
nineteenth  century.  With  the  institutionalization  of  regular  police  forces, 

25  Callwell,  Small  Wars. 

26  Cairnes,  The  Absent-Minded  War;  Amery,  The  Times  History  of  the  War  in  South  Africa;Forster, 
The  Army  imgoS, 

27  Strachan,  "Militar,  Empire  und  Civil  Society",  p.  86;  Harries-Jenkins,  The  Army  in  Victorian 
Society;  Skelley,  The  Victorian  Army  at  Home;  Hanham,  "Religion  and  Nationality  in  the  Mid- 
Victorian  Army". 


528 


JORN  LEONHARD 


the  army  was  freed  from  domestic  functions  of  maintaining  law  and  order.  In 
combination  with  the  heroic  and  Christian  image  of  the  military  in  colonial 
conflicts,  army  and  fleet  became  incarnations  of  the  British  Empire  and 
an  imperial  idea  of  Britishness.  This  dimension  underlines  the  necessity  of 
carefully  distinguishing  between  the  armed  forces'  social  composition  on 
the  one  hand  and  the  public  view  of  army  and  navy  on  the  other. 

The  empire-nation  and  the  new  model  of  the  nation-in-arms 

British  contemporaries  of  the  wars  of  German  unification  between  1864 
and  1871  could  not  anticipate  the  new  meaning  of  large  conscript  armies 
and  a  new  national  connotation  of  the  military.  Hence  the  perception  of 
continental  warfare  and  the  experience  of  the  empire's  military  conflicts 
became  essential  factors  in  determining  the  relationship  between  British 
society  and  the  military  prior  to  1914. 28  Britishness  gained  a  new  meaning 
which  went  far  beyond  the  union  and  received  fundamental  stimulations 
from  the  perception  of  continental  and  imperial  warfare.29  The  wars  of 
1870-1871  seemed  to  reveal  a  new  kind  of  mass  warfare  which  went  together 
with  a  "decline  of  the  chivalry  of  war".30  The  image  of  a  professional  army, 
composed  of  mercenaries,  was  challenged  by  large  conscript  armies  symbol- 
izing the  apparent  necessity  of  whole  nations-in-arms:  "The  restless  military 
spirit  which  produced  the  soldier  of  fortune  is  now  on  the  wane."31 

At  the  same  time,  the  Leitmotiv  of  the  British  military  as  "Christian 
soldiers"  shaped  public  perceptions  of  the  army.  It  was  essentially  derived 
from  the  experiences  of  the  empire's  wars.  Given  the  absence  of  large  stand- 
ing armies  in  Britain  itself,  the  image  of  the  "true  Tommy"  as  the  incarnation 
of  national  and  Christian  values  became  ever  more  popular  and  began 
to  overshadow  traditional  notions  of  antimilitarism.32  That  process  had 
already  started  during  the  wars  against  France  before  1815  and  was  revived 

28  Preston,  Patriots  in  Arms;  Maurice,  War;  Henderson,  The  Science  of  War,  "The  British  Army", 
"Foreign  Citizens",  "War",  all  three  in  Henderson,  The  Science  of  War;  Hart,  Reflections  on  the  Art 
of  War,  Moral  Force  in  War,  A  Vindication  of  War;  Oman,  A  History  of the  Art  of War;  Risley,  The 
Law  of  War;  Maude,  "M.  Bloch  as  a  Prophet";  Browning,  Wars  of  the  Century  and  the  Development 
of  Military  Science;  Foster,  Organization. 

29  Ely,  The  Road  to  Armageddon;  MacDonald,  "A  Poetics  of  War";  Wilkinson,  Depictions  and 
Images  of  War  in  Edwardian  Newspapers;]ahr,  "British  Prussianism". 

30  Dalberg,  The  War  of  7870,  p.  41. 

31  Grant,  British  Heroes  in  Foreign  Wars,  p.  vi. 

32  Anderson,  "The  Growth  of  Christian  Militarism  in  Mid-Victorian  Britain". 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


529 


during  the  Crimean  War  and  the  Indian  Mutiny  in  1857-1858.  The  civic 
element  of  antimilitarism,  derived  from  the  conflicts  of  the  seventeenth 
century  and  so  important  for  the  English  national  self-image,  became  more 
and  more  overshadowed  by  ethnic  and  racial  connotations  of  the  superior 
British  empire-nation,  thus  at  the  same  time  integrating  the  different  parts 
of  the  union.  Against  the  background  of  the  Crimean  War,  Lord  Panmure 
underlined  the  changing  image  of  the  army  in  1855:  "I  trust  our  present 
experience  will  prove  to  our  countrymen  that  our  army  must  be  something 
more  than  a  mere  colonial  guard  or  home  police;  that  it  must  be  the  means 
of  maintaining  our  name  abroad  and  causing  it  to  be  respected  in  peace  as 
well  as  admired  and  dreaded  in  war."33  The  Times  in  1856  added  that  "any 
hostility  which  may  have  existed  in  bygone  days  towards  the  army  has  long 
since  passed  away.  The  red  coat  of  the  soldier  is  honoured  throughout  the 
country."34  The  successful  repression  of  the  Indian  Mutiny  in  1858  provoked 
numerous  reactions  pointing  to  Britain's  Christian  mission,  its  pioneering 
role  for  civilization,  and  its  superiority  over  the  barbarian.  As  the  Baptist 
Magazine  remarked  in  1858:  "The  tide  of  rebellion  [has  been]  turned  back 
by  the  wisdom  and  prowess  of  Christian  men,  by  our  Lawrences,  Edwardes, 
Montgomerys,  Freres,  and  Havelocks  [...]  God,  as  it  were,  especially  selecting 
them  for  this  purpose."35 

God's  mission  in  this  view  served  to  legitimize  even  the  highest  sacrifice: 
"Such  a  deed  is  done  [...]  when  a  soldier,  true  to  his  Queen  and  country,  is  true 
also  to  his  God  and  preaches  while  he  practices  the  principles  and  gospel 
of  the  Prince  of  Peace,  in  the  presence  of  those  with  whom  he  acts  his  part 
in  the  world's  drama."36  Thus  the  topos  of  the  "soldier  of  Christ"  generated  a 
suggestive  self-image:  the  British  nation  seemed  to  act  in  accordance  with 
a  godly  mission.  Officers  and  soldiers  should  act  as  Christian  heroes  or  die 
as  martyrs.  Contrasted  with  the  realities  of  British  industrial  society,  the 
imperial  connotation  of  the  military  generated  an  exotic  counterimage  of 
a  nonconditioned  existence.  This  also  explains  the  enormous  successes  of 
contemporary  war  literature  which  time  and  again  presented  the  British 
Empire  as  a  counterworld  to  Britain's  industrial  society.37  "British  gallantry" 

33  Quoted  in  Bartlett,  Defence  and  Diplomacy,  p.  126. 

34  The  Times,  22  October  1856,  p.  6. 

35  Baptist  Magazine  1  (1858),  p.  323. 

36  R.  M.  Ballanty  ne,  In  the  Track  of  the  Troops.  A  Tale  of  Modern  War.  With  Illustrations  (London, 
1878),  quoted  in  Hannabus,  "Ballantyne's  Message  of  Empire",  p.  68;  see  also  Ballantyne,  The 
Settler  and  the  Savage,  Blue  lights;  or  Hot  Work  in  the  Soudan. 

37  Hodder,  Heroes  of  Britain  in  Peace  and  War;  Rhodes,  Khartoum.  Khartoum  has  fallen,  and 
Gordon  a  Prisoner,  p.  5;  Howard,  "Empire,  Race  and  War  in  Pre-1914  Britain";  Walls,  "Carrying 


530 


JORN  LEONHARD 


became  a  key  term  in  this  context.  It  was  used  to  characterize  a  collective 
quality  of  the  British,  as  their  example  in  India  seemed  to  prove:  "Every 
leaf  in  the  history  of  the  Indian  campaigns  shines  with  a  brilliant  record 
of  British  gallantry.  In  a  country  where  all  the  forces  of  nature  were  often 
opposed  to  the  advance  of  troops,  now  against  a  climate  of  unparalleled 
severity,  and  then  under  fierce  burning  rays  of  tropical  sun  [...]  England  and 
Englishmen  may  well  feel  proud  of  the  victories  so  hardly  gained  against 
native  troops  of  exceeding  valour  in  first-rate  military  training."38 

Apart  from  this  change  in  the  army's  perception,  the  empire  in  the 
course  of  the  1870s  gained  a  new  meaning  for  Britain's  military  position 
in  the  world.  When  Russian  troops  launched  an  attack  against  the  Otto- 
man Empire,  Prime  Minister  Benjamin  Disraeli  ordered  indigenous  troops 
from  India  to  intervene.  It  was  now  no  longer  the  British  colonial  troops, 
but  the  combination  of  navy,  colonial  army,  and  indigenous  military  that 
secured  Britain's  status  and  served  as  an  integration  of  the  whole  empire. 
No  doubt  this  was  an  idealized  interpretation,  but  it  explained  why  the 
nation-in-arms  model  as  it  had  developed  on  the  European  continent  was 
not  regarded  as  a  necessity  for  the  British  Empire:  "England  must  have 
seen  with  pride  the  Mediterranean  covered  with  her  ships;  she  must  have 
seen  with  pride  [...]  the  discipline  and  devotion  which  have  been  shown  to 
her  and  her  Government  by  all  her  troops,  drawn  from  every  part  of  the 
Empire.  I  leave  it  to  the  illustrious  duke  [...]  to  bear  witness  to  the  spirit  of 
imperial  patriotism  which  has  been  exhibited  by  the  troops  from  India."39 

This  image  and  the  focus  on  the  differences  between  the  British  and 
continental  military  traditions  were  clearly  challenged  by  the  experiences 
of  the  continental  wars  in  the  1860s  and  early  1870s.  British  contemporaries 
now  had  to  respond  to  the  implicit  comparison  between  the  ideal  of  a 
small  professional  army  on  the  one  hand  and  large  conscript  armies  on 
the  other.  However,  in  contrast  to  the  continental  multiethnic  empires, 
these  reactions  did  not  lead  to  a  complete  overthrow  of  the  British  army's 
organization  before  the  experience  of  World  War  I,  but  they  stimulated  an 
increasingly  intense  debate  about  the  relation  between  the  military  and 
society  in  general  and  imperial  defense  in  particular.  The  reason  for  not 
following  the  example  of  the  Habsburg  monarchy,  tsarist  Russia,  or  the 
Ottoman  Empire,  to  say  nothing  of  Germany  or  France,  may  be  seen  in  the 
geographically  absence  of  imperial  wars  conducted  by  Britain.  The  British, 

the  White  Man's  Burden". 

38  Armytage,  Wars  of  Queen  Victoria's  Reign,  p.  228. 

39  Disraeli,  "Berlin  Treaty.  Speech  in  the  House  of  Lords,  18th  July  1878". 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


531 


at  least  prior  to  the  Boer  War,  were  never  confronted  with  the  kind  of  direct 
military  crises  which  tsarist  Russia  had  experienced  in  1856,  the  Habsburg 
monarchy  in  1859  and  1866,  or  the  Ottoman  Empire  in  the  1870s  and  again 
during  the  Balkan  Wars.  There  was  no  similar  pressure  for  the  British  to  act, 
a  factor  which  was  reinforced  by  the  dominance  of  the  Royal  Navy,  which 
was  never  really  challenged. 

Nevertheless,  the  perception  of  the  continental  model  of  a  nation-in- 
arms, accompanied  by  popular  Social  Darwinism,  stimulated  a  dynamic 
discussion  about  British  military  organization  and  the  future  prospects  of 
the  empire.  The  imagined  war  of  the  future  forced  contemporaries  to  criti- 
cally reflect  upon  and  challenge  the  traditional  view  of  the  military  and  led 
to  new  concepts  of  war.  When  James  Ram  published  his  Philosophy  ofWar  in 
1878  he  insisted  on  the  belligerent  origins  of  the  English  nation  in  analogy 
to  the  Romans:  "In  effect  the  English  nation  [...]  grew  out  of  a  concourse 
of  kindred  tribes  engaged  in  incessant  warfare  among  themselves.  In  the 
course  of  time  domination  over  the  rest  was  achieved  successively  by  tribes 
of  higher  and  higher  degrees  of  pugnacity,  and  so  the  lines  of  a  great  nation 
were  laid  down.  It  was  just  the  same  in  ancient  Italy  and  in  Greece,  where 
Rome  and  Macedon  respectively  took  the  final  lead."  In  comparison  with 
France  prior  to  and  after  the  defeat  of  1871  Ram  came  to  see  the  vitalizing 
effects  of  war  which  he  applied  to  the  English  nation  as  well:  "Was  any  pure 
nation  ever  known  with  whom  war  was  not  a  sacrifice  enthusiastically 
offered  in  defense  of  what  it  held  holy?  In  what  country  is  public  life  so  pure 
as  in  England?  And  the  English  are  always  at  war  in  some  part  of  the  world. 
The  lower  French  Empire  was  peace,  but  what  a  corrupting  peace  it  was,  and 
how  much  purer  has  France  been  since  the  Franco-German  war."40  At  the 
same  time  Ram  saw  Britain  as  in  danger  of  losing  its  reputation  and  power 
status  if  it  continued  to  rely  on  volunteers  for  a  small  professional  army.  The 
military  successes  of  disciplined  and  effective  conscript  armies  had  clearly 
demonstrated  the  superiority  of  the  model  of  a  nation-in-arms.  Britain,  in 
contrast,  was  about  to  lose  the  means  to  secure  the  nation's  and  hence  the 
empire's  survival:  "If  England  cannot  command  voluntary  soldiers  enough 
to  defend  her  homes  or  to  maintain  her  empire,  the  sooner  we  give  up  the 
role  of  a  powerful  nation  the  better.  A  nation  that  cannot  find  voluntary 
soldiers  of  her  own  stock  deserves  to  be  conquered  by  any  other  that  can."41 
Ram's  premises  were  derived  from  a  Social  Darwinist  model  of  selection, 

40  Ram,  The  Philosophy  of  War,  pp.  32-33,  40,  47. 

41  Ibid.,  p.  72;  Hayes,  Conscription  Conflict;  Adams  and  Poirier,  The  Conscription  Controversy 
in  Great  Britain. 


532 


JORN  LEONHARD 


and  he  used  them  to  criticize  the  traditional  arguments  against  conscription 
as  anachronistic  and  dangerous:  "When  nature  [...]  erects  the  lists  of  natural 
selection  [...]  are  we  English  to  give  way  to  competitors  really  inferior  to  us? 
[...]  The  arming  and  training  of  whole  nations  for  supreme  struggles  with 
each  other,  is  the  latest  call  that  she  has  made  upon  their  energies,  and 
will  do  more  than  anything  else  to  determine  with  what  races  superiority 
really  lies,  and  which  are  best  fitted  to  occupy  and  replenish  the  earth."42 

For  Ram  the  dual  perception  of  both  the  European  continent  and  the 
empire  generated  a  military  dilemma  for  Britain.  The  European  wars  fought 
in  the  name  of  entire  nations  highlighted  the  differences  between  Britain 
and  the  continent.43  Whereas  Britain  focused  on  its  fleet  and  the  image  of 
a  naval  power,  the  traditional  military  structure  came  under  increasing 
pressure  when  confronted  with  the  militarization  of  continental  societies: 
"Characteristic  of  the  modern  system  is  the  increased  interest  evinced  by 
all  classes  in  each  and  every  country  in  its  military  organization,  means 
and  methods.  This  is  very  observable  in  the  states  of  the  continent,  par- 
ticularly where  universal  service  has  been  longest  established.  In  Germany 
conversance  with  things  military  pervades  all  classes.  In  France  the  army 
is  enthusiastically  supported."  In  Britain,  he  argued,  the  navy  was  "our  first 
line"  and  he  could  not  find  any  cause  to  complain  of  the  interest  the  public 
bestowed  on  it.  With  regard  to  the  army  the  British  legislature  "while  equally 
responsible  with  that  of  any  continental  nation"  seemed  less  endowed  with 
the  critical  knowledge  "requisite  for  the  use  of  its  controlling  power".  Ram 
attributed  this  to  the  "circumstances  of  our  national  history".  But  contrary 
to  the  ideal  of  a  nation-in-arms,  prepared  to  mobilize  the  resources  of  the 
whole  nation,  the  British  military  continued  to  rely  on  the  voluntary  system 
as  it  seemed  to  correspond  both  to  British  historical  experiences  and  its 
constitutional  self-image:  "Whether  before  the  enemy,  on  the  sea,  or  in  the 
foreign  garrison,  the  quality  of  spirit  and  the  tone  which  the  voluntary  system 
confers  are  of  incalculable  value;  nor  is  it  only  so  in  the  regular  army,  the 
volunteer  who  gives  willingly,  as  many  as  one  does,  more  than  the  number 
of  drills  necessary  to  secure  his  grant,  is  equally  an  exponent  of  its  value."44 

Despite  the  army's  popularity  prior  to  and  after  1815,  the  concept  of 
a  nation-in-arms  remained  a  foreign,  un-English  one.  The  reality  of  the 
empire's  small  wars,  which  were  geographically  distant  events  without  a 

42  Ram,  The  Philosophy  of  War,  p.  75. 

43  Kinglake,  The  Invasion  of  the  Crimea,  VI;  Barrington,  England  on  the  Defensive;  "Imperial 
Defence",  Royal  United  Service  Institution  fournal  (1884);  Hamley,  National  Defence. 

44  Dalton  and  Goodenough,  The  Army  Bookfor  the  British  Empire,V\,  pp.  88-89. 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


533 


direct  military  impact  on  Britain  itself,  added  to  the  belief  that  a  radical 
change  in  the  military  structure  was  not  an  imminent  necessity.  It  was 
not  until  the  1890s  that  this  position  came  under  serious  pressure.  Not 
least  against  the  background  of  an  Anglo-German  naval  rivalry,  a  future 
European  war  which  would  directly  affect  Britain  now  became  ever  more 
realistic.  This  catalyzed  discussions  about  an  adequate  military  structure, 
and  imperial  defense  served  as  a  keyword  in  these  debates.45  Still  it  was  the 
Royal  Navy  that  seemed  to  guarantee  the  status  of  the  maritime  empire- 
nation:  "The  Royal  Navy  is  to  the  British  Empire  all  and  far  more  than 
her  army  is  to  Germany  [...].  Naval  supremacy  [...]  signified  the  promise 
of  a  mighty  future.  To  the  British  Empire  of  to-day,  it  is  the  only  possible 
guarantee  of  national  existence."46  But  fears  of  a  future  invasion  and  the 
naval  race  between  Germany  and  Britain  challenged  the  premise  of  the 
geographically  distant  empire  wars.  Numerous  novels  about  a  future  war 
and  fictitious  invasions  of  the  British  Isles  contributed  to  collective  hysteria 
prior  to  1914. 47  Germany  now  took  over  the  role  of  a  prime  national  enemy 
which  Spain  had  played  in  the  sixteenth  and  France  in  the  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries.48  Confessional  and  ideological  enemy  images  were 
replaced  by  a  structure  of  competing  industrial  societies.  Military  power 
was  regarded  as  a  direct  consequence  of  national  strength  as  it  became 
visible  in  industrial  effectiveness. 

The  Boer  War  as  a  crisis  of  imperial  warfare 

After  the  perception  of  continental  warfare  in  the  1860s  and  1870s,  the 
experience  of  the  Boer  War  marked  a  major  watershed  in  British  discourses 
on  the  concept  of  a  nation-in-arms.  The  combination  of  initial  problems 
in  British  military  operations,  the  Boers'  successful  campaigns  and  the 

45  "England's  Unreadiness  for  War",  National  Review  9  (1887),  pp.  153-169;  "Naval  Warfare  and 
National  Defence",  Quarterly  Review  174  (1892),  pp.  534-566. 

46  Clarke  and  Thursfield,  The  Navy  and  the  Nation,  p.  3;  Clarke,  "The  German  Strategist  at  Sea"; 
Thursfield,  "Captain  Mahan's  Writings",  "The  Jeune  Ecole  Francaise";  see  Riiger,  "Nation,  Empire, 
and  Navy". 

47  "The  Battle  of  Dorking",  Blackwood's  Magazine  (May  1871);  Colomb  et  at,  The  Great  War 
of  i8g.  [sic]  A  Forecast;  Cave  and  Tebbutt,  The  British  Army  and  the  Business  of  War;  Le  Queux, 
Invasion  ofigro,  with  afull  Account  of  the  Siege  of  London;  A  Second  Franco-German  War  and  Its 
Consequences  for  England  (London,  1907);  Wells,  War  in  the  A/r;  Ford  and  Home,  England  Invaded; 
Chesney,  The  Battle  of  Dorking,  being  an  Account  of  the  German  Invasion  of  England;  Doyle,  Great 
Britain  and  the  Next  War. 

48  Searle,  The  Quest  for  National  Efficiency;  Robbins,  Present  and  Past. 


534 


JORN  LEONHARD 


character  of  the  events  as  a  modern  media  war  with  a  global  audience 
distinguished  this  experience  from  earlier  small  wars  within  the  British 
Empire.49  In  contrast  to  the  1870s,  this  time  Britain  was  directly  affected  and 
experienced  a  serious  crisis  of  its  ability  to  effectively  defend  the  empire.  As 
a  result,  the  self-image  as  a  successful  empire-nation  suffered  severely.  The 
Boer  War  also  marked  a  watershed  in  that  it  demonstrated  the  realities  of 
an  imperial  war.  Thousands  of  volunteers  from  Canada,  Australia,  and  New 
Zealand  had  joined  the  British  forces  in  order  to  conquer  two  small  states 
and  integrate  them  into  the  British  Empire.  Despite  some  Irish  fighters  on 
the  Boer  side,  the  pro-Boer  movement  in  Britain  made  the  war  initially 
quite  popular,  as  the  "Khaki"  elections  in  1900  showed.  Initially  it  had  been 
decided  not  to  include  "coloured  troops"  from  other  parts  of  the  empire  in 
order  to  make  it  "a  white  man's  war".  However,  both  the  British  and  the  Boers 
were  forced  to  include  soldiers  recruited  from  the  African  population  in  the 
course  of  the  conflict.  Consequently,  more  than  100,000  Africans  served  as 
scouts  and  labourers.  Lord  Kitchener,  the  commander-in-chief  of  the  British 
forces  in  1900-1902  had  to  admit  to  the  arming  of  more  than  10,000  men, 
but  research  into  the  topic  has  shown  that  David  Lloyd  George's  estimation 
of  approximately  30,000  was  much  more  realistic.50  What  became  more 
important  was  that  the  military  conflict  soon  revealed  the  deficiencies  of 
the  British  colonial  military.  Final  victory  was  achieved  only  by  quantita- 
tive superiority  and  by  radicalizing  the  means  of  war,  especially  by  the 
systematic  destruction  of  Boers'  farms  and  the  deportation  of  women  and 
children  into  newly  established  "concentration  camps".51 

Below  the  surface  of  war  enthusiasm,  public  responses  to  the  events  in 
South  Africa  and  their  interpretation  by  the  new  mass  media  also  reflected 
a  deepening  crisis  in  the  self-image  of  the  empire-nation.  William  Lecky 
stated  that  the  war  meant  a  huge  disappointment  for  the  British  nation.5Z 
In  addition  the  military  operations  provoked  widespread  criticism,  which 

49  Hampton,  "The  Press,  Patriotism,  and  Public  Discussion";  Steinsieck,  "Ein  imperialistischer 
Medienkrieg". 

50  Saunders  and  Smith,  "Southern  Africa,  1795-1914",  pp.  618-619. 

51  Price,  An  Imperial  War  and  the  British  Working  Class;  Pakenham,  The  Boer  War;  Warwick 
and  Spies,  The  South  African  War;  Friedberg,  The  Weary  Titan;  Grundlingh,  "The  Bitter  Legacy 
of  the  Boer  War";  Surridge,  Managing  the  South  African  War,  i8gg-igo2;  Dennis  and  Grey,  The 
Boer  War. 

52  Lecky,  Moral  Aspects  of  the  South  African  War,  p.  7;  see  Ellam,  "Capitalist  Patriotism  and 
Its  Effects  in  South  Africa";  Warren,  "Some  Lessons  from  the  South  African  War";  Robertson, 
Patriotism  and  Empire;  Yate,  "The  Spirit  of  the  Nation  in  War";  Mahan,  "The  Influence  of  the 
South  African  War  upon  the  Prestige  of  the  British  Empire";  Kent,  "Patriotism  or  Imperialism?"; 
Goltz,  "The  Military  Lessons  of  the  South  African  War";  Grey,  The  Land  We  Love. 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


535 


now  turned  against  the  traditional  impirial  patriotism.  For  critical  con- 
temporaries the  war  had  underlined  that  the  empire  was  more  and  more 
founded  on  uncivilized  violence  and  that  it  caused  a  huge  financial  burden 
for  Britain,  which  prevented  it  from  following  the  German  model  of  progres- 
sive social  reforms  at  home.53  In  this  context,  it  seemed  that  conscription, 
if  ever  introduced,  would  become  yet  another  burden  for  British  workers: 
"Empire  and  Conscription?  [...]  What  have  you  to  say,  John  Smith,  you  who 
are  to  pay  and  bleed?  No  one  dare  seriously  propose  Conscription  to-day, 
but  in  the  histories  of  nations  come  days  of  imminent  danger  and  panic; 
fears  become  excited  and  people  lose  their  heads.  If  Conscription  ever  comes 
to  England,  it  will  come  at  some  such  crisis."54  Other  observers  pointed  to 
the  general  unpopularity  of  conscription  in  British  society  and  to  practical 
difficulties  in  applying  it  to  the  empire:  "Conscription  is  talked  of,  but  that 
would  not  be  popular,  our  people  don't  want  to  be  driven.  They  will  always 
answer  the  call  in  thousands,  and  storm  any  position  to  give  their  enemy 
the  cold  steel,  there  is  no  lack  of  pluck,  but  soldiers  must  be  trained,  and 
their  training  must  be  kept  up  these  days,  and  the  best  trained  will  win 
the  day.  Again  with  India  and  our  many  Colonies  and  responsibilities  how 
would  conscription  act,  you  would  have  three  or  four  different  armies,  each 
under  different  rules."55 

Yet,  on  the  other  hand,  parts  of  the  British  public  identified  enthusiasti- 
cally with  the  fate  of  the  British  "Tommy"  who  fought  as  a  volunteer  for  the 
nation.  According  to  this  position,  he  deserved  at  least  the  same  estimation 
as  the  military  in  continental  conscript  armies,  if  not  more.  The  superior- 
ity of  the  volunteer  over  the  conscript  was  defended:  "Our  hero  is  not  a 
conscript.  He  enters  the  army  of  his  own  free  will  and  choice  [...].  It  will  be 
interesting  to  note  whether  any  'snubbing'  process  will  be  inflicted  upon 
him  after  he  has  done  his  best  for  the  glory  and  honour  of  the  country,  -  or 
whether  hats  will  be  touched  as  he  comes  and  goes  in  places  of  resort  and 
amusement,  out  of  respect  for  the  uniform  he  wears,  as  is  the  case  with  his 
brothers  in  Austria  and  Germany."  As  a  soldier  of  the  crown  and  dressed  in 
the  Queen's  uniform  he  ought  to  expect  "as  much  respect  throughout  the 
English  Empire  wherever  he  goes,  as  a  soldier  of  the  German  Emperor  in 
the  Emperor's  uniform  receives  in  every  part  of  the  German  Empire,  -  nay 


53  Maude,  War  and  Patriotism,  p.  31. 

54  Thompson,  Towards  Conscription,  p.  16. 

55  Godwin-Austin,  An  Army  without  Conscription,  pp.  1-2. 


536 


JORN  LEONHARD 


even  more,  for  the  German  'Tommy'  is  compelled  to  serve,  while  his  English 
brother  serves  by  choice."56 

Kenelm  Digby  Cotes's  Social  and  Imperial  Life  of  Britain,  published  in 
1900  and  widely  read,  tried  to  analyze  the  new  relation  between  the  British 
nation  and  the  military  in  the  light  of  recent  war  experiences.  To  him, 
as  to  many  contemporaries,  the  Boer  War  had  underlined  the  necessity 
of  mobilizing  all  the  resources  of  the  nation.  War  had  become  a  test  of 
the  nation's  survival  in  an  age  of  dynamic  international  competition, 
which  Britain  could  only  survive  on  the  basis  of  a  community  of  citizens 
and  not  as  a  society  of  antagonistic  classes.  Hence  political  participation 
and  imperial  defense  became  necessarily  interrelated:  "The  connection 
between  war  and  the  national  character,  important  as  it  always  was,  is  of 
immeasurably  greater  importance  at  the  present  time  [...].  Now  that  the 
citizen  soldier  has  almost  taken  the  place  of  the  paid  soldier,  war  will  be, 
more  than  it  ever  was,  an  index  of  the  state  of  the  country."  Following  the 
classical  premises  of  the  Whig  interpretation  of  history,  military  service 
and  political  participation  had  to  go  hand  in  hand.  In  the  highly  idealized 
sense  of  a  linear  process  of  uninterrupted  constitutional  progress,  the  end 
of  dynastic  wars  and  arming  the  people  seemed  to  come  together.  It  was 
again  the  self-image  of  evolutionary  continuity  that  served  as  a  national 
self-affirmation:  "In  England,  each  stage  in  arming  the  people  is  a  stage  of 
industrial  and  constitutional  progress."57 

The  contemporary  mass  media's  interest  in  the  Boer  War  placed  the 
army  at  the  very  center  of  public  concern.  Yet  at  the  same  time  earlier 
questions  about  the  British  ability  to  conduct  a  future  war  and  to  defend  the 
empire  against  a  growing  number  of  European  competitors  were  revived.58 
Although  conscription  was  still  no  alternative,  the  contemporary  war  dis- 
courses around  1900  took  a  new  direction,  in  that  recent  war  experiences 
were  related  to  the  development  of  industrial  society  and  parliamentary 
government  as  they  had  progressed  in  nineteenth-century  Britain.  Hence 
the  conscription  controversy  after  1900  reflected  the  different  and 
controversial  interpretations  of  Britain's  modernity  in  comparison  with 
continental  nation-states,  in  particular  the  second  German  Empire  of  1871. 

In  a  highly  significant  contribution  to  this  debate,  Charles  Ross  stated 
in  1903  that  the  British  nation  had  been  falsely  immunized  against  the 
vitalizing  effects  of  wars  by  its  economic  successes.  In  comparison  with 

56  Corelli,  Patriotism  or  Self- Advertisement?,  pp.  6-7. 

57  Cotes,  Social  and  Imperial  Life  of  Britain,  I,  pp.  427-428,  642. 

58  [Cairnes],  The  Army  from  Within,  pp.  1, 148. 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


537 


continental  societies  that  had  survived  their  critical  moments  in  past  wars 
only  as  nations-in-arms,  Britain  was  now  threatened  by  decline:  "The  nation 
is  [...]  over-civilised  which,  through  the  ease,  comfort,  and  security  of  its 
existence,  gives  no  thought  to  war  [...].  Such  a  nation  quickly  degenerates; 
for  it  is  by  war,  and  by  the  constant  study  of  war,  alone,  that  a  nation  can 
maintain  itself  in  such  a  condition  as  will  enable  it  to  combat  and  overcome 
its  enemies."  Ross  and  many  of  his  contemporaries  regarded  war  as  the 
supreme  test  in  the  process  of  human  evolution,  and  modern  conscript 
armies  seemed  to  be  the  quasi-natural  means  for  that  test.  From  this  point 
of  view,  nations-in-arms  responded  to  a  new  stage  in  human  evolution, 
caused  by  the  development  of  industrial  societies.  The  Boer  War  seemed 
to  have  underlined  that,  as  a  successful  empire-nation,  Britain  was  already 
in  decline.  Ross  also  identified  the  structural  causes  behind  this  painful 
experience:  it  was  the  nation's  one-sided  focus  on  politics,  administration, 
and  economic  well-being  as  well  as  the  traditional  mistrust  of  the  military 
that  had  long  overshadowed  its  belligerent  qualities  and  prevented  the 
necessary  autonomy  of  the  military  in  a  modern  society.  For  Ross  it  was 
a  fundamental  weakness  of  representative  government  that  "soldiers  and 
sailors  [...]  are  placed  in  a  position  subordinate  to  civilian  officials,  whose 
duty  it  should  be  [...]  to  confine  their  attention  to  civil  matters".59 

Ross  reflected  upon  the  primacy  of  politics,  which  he  regarded  as  a  central 
problem  of  European  societies  around  1900:  were  democratic  systems  at  all 
capable  of  conducting  a  future  war,  or  would  their  complex  decisionmaking 
processes  on  the  basis  of  parliamentary  governments  and  a  primacy  of  the 
civil  over  the  military  not  render  them  incapable  of  effectively  defending 
themselves  in  time  of  war?  Here  the  discussion  went  far  beyond  the  practical 
problems  of  changing  a  professional  into  a  conscript  army.60  Unsurprisingly, 
Ross  developed  his  argument  on  the  basis  of  an  explicit  comparison  with 
Germany  and  against  the  background  of  highly  increased  international 
competition.  According  to  him,  the  German  Empire  after  1871  had  success- 
fully established  a  political  and  constitutional  system  which  corresponded 
adequately  to  its  military  necessities  as  a  new  nation-state:  "A  military 
despotism  which  consists  of  a  whole  nation  in  arms,  each  man  of  which  is 
as  it  were  his  own  despot  in  peace-time  and  in  matters  connected  purely 
with  his  personal  comfort,  but  who  is  a  disciplined  member  of  a  great  force 
wielded  by  the  head  of  the  nation  in  war,  is  not,  it  would  seem  in  reality, 

59  Ross,  Representative  Government  and  War,  pp.  7, 11, 162-163. 

60  Wilson,  "Democracy  and  the  War",  "The  Anti-National  Party  in  England";  Quelch,  Social- 
Democracy  and  the  Armed  Nation. 


538 


JORN  LEONHARD 


despotism.  The  German  nation  appears  to  have  succeeded  where  the  Ro- 
mans failed,  inasmuch  as  it  would  seem  to  have  found  a  form  of  government 
which  is  not  incompatible  either  with  success  in  war  or  with  true  liberty. 
All  other  nations  liable  at  any  moment  to  invasion  have  followed  this  lead." 
In  a  future  war  against  a  nation-in-arms  constituted  like  Germany,  Britain 
seemed  inevitably  inferior.61 

The  British  Empire's  particular  situation  with  its  ethnic  groups  and 
heterogeneous  structures  made  the  situation  still  worse.  In  the  light  of  these 
fundamental  problems  integrative  institutions  were  needed  to  compensate 
for  the  lack  of  unifying  war  experiences  which  characterized  the  conti- 
nental concept  of  a  unifying  and  integrative  nation-in-arms.  In  contrast, 
the  British  Empire  presented  only  a  "conglomeration  of  [...]  nations"  which 
could  be  kept  together  neither  through  language  or  family  ties  nor  on  the 
basis  of  economic  relations.  Ross  argued  in  favor  of  military  cohesion  and 
advocated  an  imperial  military  community,  which  he  called  a  "brotherhood 
in  arms".  For  him  the  lack  of  such  a  military  community  explained  many 
of  the  empire's  problems.  According  to  him,  it  had  been  military  service 
within  the  British  union  which  had  brought  the  different  ethnic  groups  of 
the  British  Isles  together:  only  this  experience  of  common  military  service 
had  finally  integrated  Scots,  Welsh,  and  Irish  into  the  Union  of  Great  Britain. 
The  union  model  of  a  successful  military  community  now  had  to  be  applied 
to  the  empire  at  large.  The  military  experience  of  the  union  served  as  a 
model  for  integrating  the  whole  empire,  and  this  allowed  Ross  to  link  the 
South  African  crisis  to  the  Irish  problem  when  referring  to  the  role  played  by 
Irish  soldiers  in  the  British  armed  forces:  "The  assimilation  of  South  Africa 
is  no  more  a  complicated  problem  than  is  the  suppression  of  rebellion  in 
Ireland.  The  sole  difficulty  lies  in  bringing  an  uneducated  nation  governed 
by  sentiment  and  a  popular  government  to  grasp  the  necessity  for  action.  A 
whole  race,  related  to  the  Empire  in  blood,  but  distinct  from  it  in  language, 
in  tradition,  and  in  religion,  must  be  brought  to  form  an  integral  part  of 
the  Empire.  No  more  loyal  man  than  the  Irish  soldier  exists;  he  has  fought 
side  by  side  with  other  men  of  his  race,  and  knows  their  worth,  even  as  they 
know  his.  He  is  proof  against  the  wiles  of  the  pedagogue  and  the  politician. 
A  brotherhood  in  arms,  the  great  bond  which  establishes  fast  friendship 
between  nation  and  nation  as  between  man  and  man,  will  alone  bind  South 
Africa  to  the  remainder  of  the  Empire,  as  it  will  alone  bring  to  a  termination 
the  intrigue  and  covert  rebellion  in  the  South  of  Ireland."6* 

61  Ross,  Representative  Government  and  War,  pp.  221-222, 292. 

62  Ibid.,  pp.  362-363, 365. 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


539 


Imperial  defense  prior  to  and  after  1914 

The  link  which  contemporary  observers  established  between  the  war  in 
South  Africa  and  the  Irish  crisis  is  highly  significant  for  the  British  Empire's 
complexity  before  1914.  The  military  was  in  many  ways  the  very  link  between 
these  different  scenarios.  Ireland  was,  as  Engels  had  once  put  it,  England's 
first  colony,  but  it  also  formed  part  of  the  empire's  metropolitan  center  by 
supplying  the  empire  with  soldiers,  settlers,  and  administrative  personnel, 
thus  taking  advantage  of  possible  careers  in  the  military,  in  the  colonial 
administration,  or  in  commerce  and  trade.63  That  was  per  se  no  exception: 
Indians  also  helped  to  govern  India,  and  colonial  subjects  of  the  French 
Empire  engaged  in  similar  functions.64  But  nowhere  did  the  dual  role  generate 
such  a  paradoxical  constellation.  The  example  of  the  Boer  War  demonstrates 
this:  two  Transvaal  Brigades  were  formed  by  the  Irish  on  behalf  of  the  Boers, 
but  serving  on  the  opposite  side  were  about  28,000  Irish  soldiers  in  the 
British  army.  Ireland's  status  as  both  colonial  and  imperial  became  obvious 
during  the  war:  if  pro-Boer  agitation  inspired  the  Irish  republican  movement, 
serving  the  empire  against  the  Boers  in  South  Africa  was  an  important  aspect 
of  Ulster  Unionism.  Yet  comparing  Irish  and  Boer  secessionist  nationalism 
ignored  the  Boers'  treatment  of  black  Africans.  Pro-Boer  agitation  certainly 
radicalized  nationalist  feelings  in  Ireland  before  1914,  in  that  parliamentary 
representation  was  increasingly  seen  as  irrelevant.65 

This  highly  complex  identity  as  both  colonial  and  imperial  is  obvious 
from  many  biographies  of  leading  Irish  Home  Rulers  in  the  last  third  of 
the  nineteenth  century:  they  were  proud  of  Irish  feats  within  the  British 
forces,  yet  critical  of  the  British  Army  itself,  which  they  often  regarded  as 
a  repressive  force  in  the  hands  of  Protestant  Unionists.  They  welcomed  the 
individual  careers  of  their  children  in  the  colonial  forces  or  in  the  impe- 
rial administration,  but  were  critical  of  the  rulers  of  the  empire  as  such. 
Hundreds  of  Irish  nationalists  exemplified  this  paradoxical  constellation 
in  their  own  biographies  and  careers:  they  welcomed  Home  Rule,  but  they 
also  fought  in  the  British  forces  after  1914,  and  yet  later  proceeded  in  the 
ranks  of  the  Irish  Republican  Army.66 


63  Kenny,  "The  Irish  in  the  Empire",  pp.  92-93;  Holmes,  "The  Irish  and  India",  p.  235;  Jeffery, 
"An  Irish  Empire"? 

64  Kiernan,  Colonial  Empires  and  Armies. 

65  Kenny,  "Ireland  and  the  British  Empire",  pp.  19, 193. 

66  Jackson,  "Ireland,  the  Union,  and  the  Empire",  pp.  137-139. 


540 


JORN  LEONHARD 


The  interrelation  between  imperial  and  colonial  identity  also  continued 
after  1914,  but  now  the  constellation  began  to  change.  An  estimated  200,000 
men  from  all  parts  of  Ireland  served  in  the  British  forces  during  World  War 
I.  Thus  Irishmen  made  up  about  10  per  cent  of  the  British  army  recruits 
in  1913  compared  with  20  per  cent  in  1870.  In  the  Dominions,  enlistment 
during  World  War  I  varied  between  13  per  cent  and  19  per  cent  of  the  overall 
white  population,  but  for  Ireland  the  figures  were  down  to  only  6  per  cent. 
Recruitment  from  Ireland  declined  especially  after  the  Easter  Rising  of 
1916. 67  At  the  same  time  a  very  influential  antiwar  movement  emerged  that 
included  veterans  from  the  Transvaal  Committee.  The  complexity  of  empire 
relations  meant  that  serving  the  British  forces  did  not  exclude  secessionist 
and  radical  nationalism.  There  was  still  an  elaborate  overlapping  of  military 
service  and  revolutionary  agitation  against  London.68 

Finally,  the  contemporary  reference  to  Ireland  in  the  context  of  coming 
to  terms  with  the  experience  of  the  Boer  War  certainly  overshadowed  the 
fact  that  prior  to  1914  it  was  with  regard  to  the  Home  Rule  debate  that  serious 
tensions  arose  between  parts  of  the  military  elite  and  the  government  in 
London.  The  army  presented  itself  as  the  most  important  integrating  force 
of  both  union  and  empire,  as  the  Curragh  mutiny  demonstrated.  When  in 
March  1914  officers  of  the  6th  Cavalry  Brigade  in  Ireland  declared  that  they 
were  not  prepared  to  march  to  the  North  to  implement  autonomy,  Lord 
Roberts  openly  supported  their  position  and  demanded  the  resignation  of 
the  chief  of  the  General  Staff.69  Here,  the  army's  self-image  as  the  guarantee 
of  the  British  union  as  the  empire's  center  became  apparent.  Ireland  and  not 
the  maritime  empire  was  the  testing  ground  for  this  process  which,  because 
of  the  outbreak  of  World  War  I,  was  postponed  until  1918.  The  example  of 
the  violent  actions  of  demobilized  soldiers  in  Ireland  after  the  end  of  the 
war  underlined  the  role  of  the  military  at  the  periphery.70 

It  was  World  War  I  that  brought  about  both  a  new  role  of  the  colonies 
and  Dominions  and  a  fundamentally  new  relationship  between  Britain 
and  the  empire.  Radicalizing  the  earlier  experience  of  the  Boer  War,  the 

67  Kenny,  "The  Irish  in  the  Empire",  pp.  108-109;  Jeffery,  Ireland  and  the  Great  War,  pp.  39, 
107-143,  The  British  Army  and  the  Crisis  of  Empire,  p.  1. 

68  Kenny,  "Ireland  and  the  British  Empire",  20;  Jackson,  "Ireland,  the  Union,  and  the  Empire", 
p.  142. 

69  Beckett,  The  Army  and  the  Curragh  Incident;  Muenger,  The  British  Military  Dilemma  in 
Ireland;  see  Speeches  and  letters  of  Field-Marshall  Earl  Roberts  on  Imperial  Defence,  A  Nation 
in  Arms.  Speeches  on  the  Requirements  of  the  British  Army,  delivered  by  Field-Marshall,  The  Earl 
Roberts,  lord  Roberts'  Campaign  Speeches.  A  Continuation  of  "The  Message  to  the  Nation". 

70  Gregory,  "Peculiarities  of  the  English?" 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


541 


empire  now  came  close  to  being  a  single  military  entity  with  joint  military 
operations  in  various  theaters  of  war.71  Pan-British  sentiments  dominated  in 
the  white  Dominions,  and  the  outbreak  of  war  was  often  used  to  defend  the 
very  different  positions  held  in  the  hierarchy  of  the  empire.  Thus  reactions 
from  Canada  or  Australia  differed  from  those  in  India,  where  the  annual 
Indian  National  Congress  in  Madras  during  December  1914  was  poorly 
attended.72  What  became  clear,  however,  was  the  growing  importance  of 
imperial  troops  for  the  military  theaters  around  the  world,  as  the  numbers 
of  imperial  soldiers  sent  abroad  and  lost  in  military  operations  demonstrate 
(see  Table  17.1). 


Table  17.1  Soldiers  from  the  British  Empire  in  World  War  I 


Estimated 

Troops  sent 

%of 

Killed, 

%of 

population 

abroad 

popula- 

died, and 

troops 

in  1914 

tion 

missing 

sent 

abroad 

British  Isles 

46,000,000 

5,000,000 

10.9 

705,000 

14.1 

Canada 

8,000,000 

458,000 

5.7 

57,000 

12.4 

Australia 

5,000,000 

332,000 

6.6 

59,000 

17.8 

South  Africa 

1,400,000 

136,000 

9.7 

7,000 

5.1 

New  Zealand 

1,100,000 

112,000 

10.2 

17,000 

15.2 

Source:  All  data,  except  percentages,  are  taken  from  table  5.1  in  Holland,  "The  British  Empire  and 
the  Great  War",  p.  117. 

A  special  role  was  played  by  the  Indian  army.  From  summer  1914  to  the  end 
of  1918  it  recruited  another  826,868  combatants  and  445,592  noncombat- 
ants.  Indian  army  casualties  officially  included  64,449  killed  and  69,214 
wounded.  In  sum,  16.2  per  cent  of  all  Indian  soldiers  recruited  during  the  war 
were  killed  or  wounded  in  action.  In  1918,  a  total  of  943,344  Indian  troops 
were  serving  in  major  war  theaters:  14.1  per  cent  in  France,  5.0  per  cent  in 
Africa,  62.4  per  cent  in  Mesopotamia,  12.3  per  cent  in  Egypt,  1.0  per  cent  in 
Salonica,  5.2  per  cent  in  Aden  and  in  the  Gulf.  Making  India  the  "barrack  in 
the  Eastern  seas"  also  meant  changing  its  weight  within  the  empire,  and  the 
result  was  a  new  equation  between  war  contributions  and  political  status. 
A  new  tacit  principle  emerged  that  anticipated  future  developments:  "no 
contribution  without  representation".73 

71  Jeffery,  The  British  Army  and  the  Crisis  of  Empire,  p.  1. 

72  Holland,  "The  British  Empire  and  the  Great  War",  pp.  114-117. 

73  Ibid.,  pp.  122-123;  Brown,  "War  and  the  Colonial  Relationship". 


542 


JORN  LEONHARD 


Conclusion:  Britain  in  comparative  perspective 

Whereas  French,  German,  or  Italian  societies  experienced  their  war  ideal 
in  national  wars,  fought  in  their  collective  imagination  by  nations-in-arms, 
the  British  referred  to  the  empire's  small  wars,  in  which  the  army  came  to 
represent  an  imagined  empire-nation,  an  idea  encompassing  many  ethnic 
and  racial  connotations.  In  contrast  to  continental  societies,  the  tendency 
to  anticipate  a  major  future  war  in  Europe  as  a  conflict  over  the  existence 
of  the  entire  nation  was  a  rather  late  development  in  Britain.  Only  after 
1890,  and  in  the  context  of  the  naval  race  with  Germany,  did  a  possible 
German  invasion  lead  to  hysterical  reactions  among  the  British  public. 
These  invasion  panics  had  their  origins  in  the  sixteenth,  seventeenth,  and 
eighteenth  centuries  when  they  had  been  focusing  on  Spain  and  France  as 
the  main  political  and  confessional  enemies,  a  perception  that  was  renewed 
before  1815  and  again  during  the  three  anti-French  panics  of  1848, 1852,  and 
1859.74  It  was  only  from  the  1890s  onwards  that  Germany  began  to  replace 
France  as  the  anticipated  invader  of  the  future.  This  collective  perception 
increased  the  popularity  of  both  the  army  and  the  navy  before  1914.  But 
in  contrast  to  continental  countries,  it  was  not  a  cult  of  a  nation-in-arms 
that  characterized  this  development,  but  rather  a  belated  militarization  of 
society,  as  the  numerous  paramilitary  activities  of  army  and  navy  leagues, 
boy  brigades,  and  boy  scout  movements  illustrated.75 

National  wars,  shaping  the  religious  and  national  identity  of  the  British, 
had  characterized  the  conflicts  with  Spain  and  France  in  the  early  modern 
period  and  during  the  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  centuries.  Instead 
of  the  short  national  wars  on  the  continent  between  1859  and  1871,  Britain 
witnessed  more  or  less  constant  military  action  in  its  colonies.  The  absence 
of  large  conscript  armies  on  the  British  island  and  the  colonial  small  wars 
allowed  the  imagination  of  an  empire-nation,  symbolized  by  the  army 
abroad  which  came  to  represent  British  and  Christian  values.  In  contrast 
to  continental  cases,  belligerent  images  of  the  British  nation  paradoxically 
developed  both  earlier  and  later:  earlier  in  the  wars  from  the  sixteenth  to 
the  eighteenth  centuries  against  Spain  and  France  and  later,  in  the  context 
of  armament  races,  in  the  anti-German  invasion  panics  during  the  decade 
before  1914.  With  the  disappearance  of  traditional  antimilitarism,  ethnic 


74  Colley,  Britons. 

75  Strachan,  "Militar,  Empire  und  Civil  Society",  p.  90;  Cunningham,  The  Volunteer  Force; 
Strachan,  History  of  the  Cambridge  University  Officers  Training  Corps;  Beckett,  Riflemen  Form. 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


543 


and  racial  connotations  of  Anglo-Saxon  superiority  and  British-Christian 
civilization  increasingly  dominated  contemporary  war  discourses. 

Before  1914  a  large  spectrum  of  connotations  associated  with  modern 
warfare  characterized  the  British  case.  The  presence  of  positive  and  affirma- 
tive or  critical  positions  reflected  the  complexity  of  a  modern  industrial 
society  which  fell  under  increasing  pressure  from  the  empire's  overstretch 
and  international  competition.  War  was  accepted  as  a  necessary  means  and 
a  ferment  of  state-building.76  It  could  be  seen  as  a  universalized  principle 
of  competition,  selection,  and  rationalization:  "The  science  of  organisation 
must  raise  and  standardise  the  art  and  practice  of  all  organisations,  whether 
employed  in  military  warfare,  in  the  warfare  which  society  or  a  nation 
wages  as  a  whole,  or  in  a  warfare  which  a  section  of  society  wages  -  must 
apply  to  an  Empire  as  to  a  municipality,  to  a  public  department  as  to  a 
private  business."77  If  Britain  did  not  experience  the  nation-in-arms  model 
by  the  introduction  of  conscription,  it  certainly  experienced  a  process  of 
militarization  of  society.  Popular  notions  of  a  belligerent  jingoism  were  a 
prominent  feature  of  prewar  mass  culture.  Veterans',  voluntary  and  military 
associations,  youth  movements,  and  students  played  an  important  role  in 
this  militarization  of  British  society  before  1914.78 

Yet  at  the  same  time  the  numerous  articles,  essays,  and  books  on  imperial 
defense  also  underline  the  impact  of  implicit  comparisons  between  the 
British  Empire  and  continental  powers  which  were  perceived  as  belliger- 
ent nations-in-arms.79  Conscription  remained  a  controversial  issue.  This 
comparison  was  made  even  more  difficult  in  the  light  of  British  workers' 
distance  toward  the  military,  which  was  regarded  as  a  potential  weakness 
in  a  future  war:  "The  mass  of  the  people  is  utterly  oblivious  of  sound  military 
principles  [...]  there  are  millions  of  the  working  classes  to  whom  England, 
as  England,  does  not  exist.  They  recognise  [...]  no  allegiance  to  a  country  in 
which  their  whole  stake  is  the  chance  of  wresting  a  bare  subsistence  from 
the  blind  commercial  force  by  which  they  are  wholly  dominated."80 

76  Holsti,  "The  Relation  of  War  to  the  Origin  of  State". 

77  Williams,  Military  and  Industrial  War  and  the  Science  of  Organisation,  p.  14. 

78  Price,  "Society,  Status  and  Jingoism";  Pryke,  "The  Popularity  of  Nationalism  in  the  Early 
British  Boy  Scout  Movement";  Ward,  Red  Flag  and  Union  Jack;  Levsen,  Elite,  Mdnnlichkeit  und 
Krieg,  pp.  123-125, 171-173. 

79  Dilke  and  Wilkinson,  Imperial  Defence;  Wilkinson,  The  Great  Alternative,  "Preparation 
for  War",  The  Brain  of  an  Army,  Britain  at  Bay,  War  and  Policy;  Horsfall,  National  Service  and 
the  Welfare  of  the  Community;  Underwood,  A  Plea  for  National  Military  Training  in  Britain; 
Arnold-Foster,  Military  Needs  and  Military  Policy;]ames,  "The  Moral  Equivalent  of  War";  Callwell, 
"Introduction". 

80  Cornford,  The  Defenceless  Island,  pp.  235-236. 


544 


JORN  LEONHARD 


This  was  no  exception  in  European  comparison.  In  stark  contrast  to  his 
belief  in  maintaining  political  and  military  control  of  war,  the  military 
hero  of  the  German  Wars  of  Unification,  Helmuth  von  Moltke,  who  had 
benefited  so  much  from  the  military  power  of  a  disciplined  conscript  army, 
in  one  of  his  last  speeches  in  the  Reichstag  in  May  1890,  pointed  out  that  the 
traditional  concept  of  cabinet  wars  had  now  irrevocably  come  to  an  end. 
Reflecting  upon  the  dilemma  of  the  nations-in-arms,  he  saw  traditional 
cabinet  wars  replaced  by  new  peoples'  wars  as  they  had  developed  since 
1848.  Wars  were  no  longer  fought  on  the  basis  of  a  political  and  military 
primacy,  but  seemed  more  and  more  influenced  by  social  interests,  social 
conflicts,  and  public  opinion.  Moltke  argued  that  the  causes  that  made 
peace  so  difficult  to  maintain  were  no  longer  princes  and  governments, 
but  peoples  and  classes,  pointing  in  particular  to  the  lower  classes'  social 
interests  and  their  will  to  use  revolutionary  force  in  order  to  improve  their 
socioeconomic  position.  Nations-in-arms  would  ultimately  mean  arming 
the  people  -  with  all  the  social  and  political  consequences  that  would  have. 
Under  these  circumstances  a  short  and  decisive  war  seemed  no  longer 
possible.  Given  the  enormous  armaments  of  all  European  powers,  a  future 
war  was  likely  to  last  indefinitely.  A  decisive  reason  for  this  prospect  was 
the  fact  that  mass  conscription  had  transformed  the  limited  size  of  earlier 
armies  into  nations-in-arms  with  virtually  unlimited  human  resources. 
Anticipating  an  experience  which  all  European  societies  would  share 
after  1914-1918,  he  argued  that  no  power  could  be  totally  defeated,  and  that 
consequently  peace  treaties  would  have  only  a  temporary  significance. 
Moltke  was  convinced  that  the  war  of  the  future  would  no  longer  be  fought 
for  territorial  gain  or  power  positions,  but  for  the  very  existence  of  nations 
and  nation-states.  Future  wars  would  therefore  transform  the  complete 
social  and  political  basis  of  existing  nations  and  of  civilization  itself.81 

Confronted  with  wars  against  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic  France, 
Prussia  at  the  beginning  of  the  century  had  introduced  universal  con- 
scription and,  in  contrast  to  the  French  model,  exemptions  had  not  been 
allowed.  However,  and  again  in  contrast  to  France,  Prussia  denied  any 
coupling  of  conscription  and  citizenship  rights.  Moltke  noticed  to  what 
extent  the  new  tendencies  toward  nations-in-arms  and  people's  wars, 
which  he  saw  advancing  after  the  conflicts  of  the  1860s  and  1870s,  would 
ultimately  include  the  right  of  political  and  social  participation  of  all  classes 
of  society  and  hence  question  the  foundations  of  the  new  German  Empire 

81  Moltke,  "Speech  in  the  Reichstag,  14th  May  1890";  see  also  Schlief fen,  Uber  die Millionenheere 
(1911);  Leonhard,  "Nation-States  and  Wars". 


NATION-BUILDING,  WAR  EXPERIENCES,  AND  EUROPEAN  MODELS 


545 


of  1871.  The  war  discourses  of  the  later  nineteenth  century  anticipated  what 
would  become  reality  only  after  1914:  a  new  concept  of  national  service, 
based  upon  common  war  sacrifices,  by  which  all  classes  of  society  could 
demand  to  participate  equally  in  a  democratic  society.  Britain,  prior  to 
World  War  I,  had  experienced  a  different  path  toward  this  development,  but 
the  consequences  of  relating  national  war  service  to  political  participation 
after  1918  became  a  common  feature  of  all  western  societies  which  had 
experienced  the  Great  War. 


Mobilizing  military  labor  in  the  age  of 
total  war 


Ottoman  conscription  before  and  during  the  Great  War 
Mehmet  Be§ikgi 

As  warfare  became  more  industrialized  and  total  from  the  mid-nineteenth 
century  onward,  conscript  labor  became  increasingly  necessary  to  meet  the 
manpower  needs  of  modern  mass  armies.  As  a  multifront  and  prolonged  war 
of  attrition,  the  Great  War  represents  the  apogee  of  this  process.  Military 
employment  in  the  form  of  obligatory  service,  required  of  every  male  citizen 
as  a  patriotic  duty,  also  defined  a  new  interaction  (both  inclusive  and  exclu- 
sive) between  the  state  and  society,  providing  the  centralizing  state  with  a 
new  mechanism  of  control  at  the  local  level.  As  a  result,  conscription  was  on 
the  agenda  not  only  of  nation-states,  but  also  of  multiethnic  empires,  includ- 
ing the  Ottoman  Empire.  This  chapter  deals  with  the  Ottoman  experience 
of  conscription.  After  discussing  Ottoman  conscription  from  its  beginnings 
in  the  nineteenth  century,  it  focuses  on  its  application  during  the  Great  War. 
Rather  than  presenting  a  thorough  description  of  Ottoman  conscription, 
the  chapter  explores  its  major  characteristics  and  peculiarities.  While  basic 
categories  of  military  labor  were  similar,  the  practice  unfolded  in  different 
ways  in  different  settings.  Therefore,  emphasizing  "the  Ottoman  difference" 
is  as  important  as  underlining  the  similarities  with  other  cases.  Besides 
providing  a  critical  analysis  of  Ottoman  conscription,  this  chapter  also 
aims  to  shed  light  on  the  Ottoman  experience  in  order  to  bring  it  into  a 
comparative  perspective  within  the  global  history  of  military  recruitment. 

The  evolution  of  Ottoman  conscription 

The  French  Revolution's  levee  en  masse  was  enacted  in  1793  to  confront  the 
threat  of  a  multifront  war  with  foreign  powers  and  of  rebellions  at  home 
by  summoning  all  able-bodied  men  to  defend  the  "nation".  The  levy  was 
regarded  as  an  action  that  would  put  into  practice  Rousseau's  prescription 
in  the  social  contract  that  "every  citizen  should  be  a  soldier  by  duty,  not 


548 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


by  trade".1  Whereas  the  French  revolutionary  mass  levy  was  an  ad  hoc 
measure,  conscription  acquired  a  systematic  form  in  the  age  of  Napoleon/ 
But  it  was  the  mid-nineteenth-century  Prussian  model  that  gave  the  system 
a  more  established  obligatory  character  and  formed  a  military  structure 
drafting  large  numbers  of  men  in  an  efficient  way.3  Conscription  not  only 
increased  the  efficiency  of  armies  in  the  age  of  industrialized  warfare,  but 
also,  and  perhaps  more  importantly,  formed  new  relations  between  state 
and  society.  It  signalled  an  intrusion  of  the  state  into  people's  lives  and 
created  an  area  of  contention  between  the  state  and  society.  Conscription 
can  also  be  depicted  as  a  battleground  between  "individual  and  local  com- 
munities on  the  one  hand  and  a  distant  impersonal  state  on  the  other".4 
Compulsory  military  service  in  nineteenth-century  Europe  was  envisioned 
as  a  way  of  creating  a  new  form  of  loyalty  to  the  state,  as  a  form  of  nationalist 
socialization,  and  as  a  new  system  of  drill  and  training  to  ensure  military 
efficiency.5 

European  models,  the  Prussian  one  in  particular,  inspired  and  influenced 
the  Ottoman  conscription  system,  but  a  more  direct  "role  model"  in  this 
respect  was  Mehmed  Ali  Pasha's  (r.  1805-1848)  modernized  Egyptian  army.6 
His  well-trained  army  of  conscripted  Egyptian  peasants  prevailed  over  Mah- 
mud  IPs  (r.  1808-1839)  Ottoman  army  in  Syria  in  1831-1833,  when  Mehmed 
Ali  was  still  nominally  an  Ottoman  governor  and  Egypt  a  province  of  the 
Ottoman  Empire.  However,  while  the  European  influence  was  significant, 
the  evolution  of  Ottoman  conscription  was  determined  to  a  considerable 
extent  by  its  own  internal  dynamics,  culture,  politics,  and  challenges. 

When  the  Ottoman  state  embarked  upon  a  process  of  military  reform  in 
the  late  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  centuries  to  establish  a  centralized 
modern  army  integrated  with  the  population,  it  increasingly  became  aware 
of  the  potential  of  obligatory  military  service  as  the  main  recruitment 
mechanism  to  realize  its  goals.7  Conscription  would  not  only  serve  as  an 
efficient  way  of  meeting  manpower  needs  of  the  newly  formed  standing 

1  Woloch,  The  New  Regime,  p.  382. 

2  Woloch,  "Napoleonic  Conscription". 

3  On  the  reorganization  of  the  conscription  system  in  Prussia  especially  after  the  defeat  of  the 
Prussian  army  at  Jena  in  1806,  see  Hippler,  Citizens,  Soldiers  and  National  Armies,  pp.  163-189. 

4  Woloch,  The  New  Regime,  p.  380;  Forrest,  Conscripts  and  Deserters,  p.  viii. 

5  Mjoset  and  Van  Holde,  "Killing  for  the  State,  Dying  for  the  Nation",  pp.  9,  51. 

6  Ziircher,  "The  Ottoman  Conscription  System  in  Theory  and  Practice",  p.  81.  On  the  Egyptian 
conscription  system  during  the  time  of  Mehmed  Ali  Pasha,  see  Fahmy,  All  the  Pasha's  Men. 

7  On  the  background  and  beginning  of  this  reform  process,  see  Aksan,  Ottoman  Wars,  ijoo- 
18/0.  See  also  Erdem,  "Recruitment  for  the  'Victorious  Soldiers  of  Muhammad'  in  the  Arab 
Provinces";  Cadirci,  Tanzimat  Siirecinde  Turkiye. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


549 


army,  but  it  would  also  contribute  to  a  more  general  reform  attempt  of 
the  Ottoman  state,  which  involved  a  move  toward  centralization  and 
better  permeation  of  state  power  into  provinces  and  local  populations.  In 
this  sense,  the  willingness  on  the  part  of  the  Ottoman  state  to  introduce 
conscription  not  only  stemmed  from  the  necessities  of  the  changing  nature 
of  warfare,8  which  compulsory  military  service  served  better  than  previous 
forms  of  recruitment,  but  it  was  also  closely  related  to  the  state's  changing 
political-ideological  preferences.  Conscription  was  attractive  because  a 
well-established  conscription  mechanism  would  give  the  political  center 
more  control  at  the  local  level  and  it  would  provide  more  effective  power 
over  local  magnates  who  had  accumulated  considerable  autonomy  in  the 
eighteenth  century.9  Therefore,  it  is  not  surprising  that  one  of  the  earlier 
steps  taken  towards  creating  a  modern  centralized  conscript  army  in  the 
Ottoman  Empire  was  the  formation  of  the  reserve  corps  {redif)  in  1834  as 
a  permanent  armed  force  stationed  in  the  provinces.10  In  establishing  this, 
Mahmud  II  acted  with  a  dual  objective.  This  would  not  only  be  a  reserve 
force  for  the  army  to  be  activated  for  external  uses  during  wartime,  but  it 
would  also  contribute  to  the  imposition  of  central  authority  over  Anatolia, 
particularly  over  the  rebellious  tribes  and  nomadic  groups.11 

Conscription  was  also  one  of  the  main  agendas  of  the  Tanzimat  (Reor- 
ganization) edict  of  1839,  which  ushered  in  major  administrative  reforms 

8  This  change  occurred  both  in  the  sense  of  "hardware"  (weapon  technology,  infrastructure, 
etc.)  and  in  that  of  "software"  (military  drill,  tactics,  strategies,  etc.). 

9  For  a  concise  analysis  of  this  process,  see  Khoury,  "The  Ottoman  Centre  versus  Provincial 
Power-Holders". 

10  The  redif 'units  initially  recruited  men  from  local  populations  on  a  voluntary  basis,  and 
then,  after  1844,  by  the  drawing  of  lots.  The  recfr/soldiers  can  be  seen  as  "part-time  soldiers". 
They  were  required  to  gather  for  training  twice  a  year,  and  they  were  called  up  during  wartime. 
At  other  times,  they  continued  their  civilian  lives.  The  main  reason  for  this  method  was  the 
scarcity  of  labor  force  in  agriculture.  Compared  to  conscription,  the  recfr/system  allowed,  during 
peacetime,  the  manpower  that  was  employed  in  agriculture  to  be  left  in  place.  On  the  redif 
sytem,  see  Cadirci,  Tanzimat  Siirecinde  Tiirkiye,  pp.  27-63.  The  Ottoman  reserve  corps  system 
became  dysfunctional  over  time  and  was  abolished  in  1913;  the  corps  were  replaced  by  regular 
army  units. 

11  Aksan,  "Ottoman  Recruitment  in  the  Late  Eighteenth  Century",  p.  33.  In  fact,  at  a  more 
general  level,  the  main  motive  for  the  entire  process  of  Ottoman  military  reform  was  to  control 
endemic  violence  both  internal  and  external.  Similar  to  Charles  Tilly's  view,  Aksan  has  linked 
militarization  and  the  articulation  of  the  modern  state:  "control  of  internal  violence  and  defence 
of  shrinking  borders  drove  mobilization  and  military  fiscalism  in  the  late  eighteenth  century, 
and  propelled  the  emergence  of  Ottoman  mid-nineteenth-century  absolutism"  (ibid.,  22).  See 
also  Tilly,  Coercion,  Capital  and  European  States.  For  a  similar  discussion  of  the  abolition  of 
the  janissaries  and  the  coming  of  a  modern  standing  army  based  on  conscription  in  the  era  of 
Mahmud  II,  see  Yddiz,  NeferinAdt  Yok. 


550 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


aimed  at  creating  a  centralized  modern  bureaucracy,  an  efficient  modern 
fiscal  system,  and  a  modern  powerful  army.  As  of  this  date,  conscription 
was  always  referred  to  in  the  official  discourse  not  only  as  one  of  the  major 
foundation  blocks  of  the  military  reform,  but  also  as  a  new  tool  that  would 
be  useful  in  creating  an  "Ottoman  citizenry"  out  of  a  multireligious  and 
multiethnic  imperial  population  in  the  age  of  nationalism." 

However,  the  implementation  of  conscription  in  the  Ottoman  Empire  was 
not  a  smooth  process.  Although  a  commitment  to  conscription  emerged  in 
the  early  1830s,  Mahmud  II's  modern  standing  army  continued  to  be  a  pro- 
fessional army  for  a  while;  it  recruited  men  as  "volunteers"  to  be  employed  as 
paid  soldiers.  The  first  comprehensive  legislation  concerning  conscription 
was  issued  only  in  1846. 13  What  pushed  Ottoman  conscription  to  be  a  more 
established  and  standardized  system  were  the  large-scale  modern  wars 
in  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  such  as  the  Crimean  War 
(1853-1856)  and  the  Russo-Ottoman  War  (1877-1878).  These  multifront  and 
industrialized  wars  demanded  much  larger  mass  armies.  The  coming  of 
the  age  of  "total  war"  with  the  Balkan  Wars  (1912-1913)  and  the  Great  War 
required  a  more  efficient  system  of  conscription,  which  could  provide  a 
large-scale  and  permanent  mobilization.14  However,  Ottoman  conscription, 
while  becoming  more  established,  continued  to  be  incomplete  as  well  as 
discriminatory  to  a  considerable  extent. 

The  incompleteness  had  mostly  to  do  with  infrastructural  problems.  The 
level  of  the  Ottoman  state's  "infrastructural  development"  was  far  from 
being  satisfactory  in  the  nineteenth  and  the  early  twentieth  centuries.15 
For  example,  the  system  of  universal  conscription  required  a  reliable 
census  to  determine  where  the  potential  manpower  could  be  found.  Such 
a  demographic  mechanism  then  necessitated  a  sizeable  growth  in  the 
state  bureaucracy,  which  would  include  an  efficient  recruitment  organi- 
zation, economic  power  to  supply  provisions  to  conscripts,  and  security 

12  On  the  changing  nature  of  the  Ottoman  recruitment  system  in  the  Tanzimat  period,  see 
Heinzelmann,  Cihaddan  Vatan  Savunmasma;  §imsek,  "Ottoman  Military  Recruitment  and  the 
Recruit". 

13  Various  major  legal  revisions  were  made  in  1869, 1886, 1909,  and  1914.  On  the  documentation 
of  the  Ottoman  laws  concerning  conscription,  see  Ay  in,  Osmanli  Devleti'nde  Tanzimat'tan  Sonra 
AskereAlma  Kanunlart. 

14  For  a  concise  account  of  these  wars,  see  Uyar  and  Erickson,  A  Military  History  of  the  Ot- 
tomans. 

15  I  am  using  "infrastructural  development"  in  the  sense  Michael  Mann  has  used  it.  See 
Mann,  The  Sources  of  Social  Power,  II,  The  Rise  of  Classes  and  Nation-States.  See  also  Weiss, 
"Infrastructural  Power,  Economic  Transformation,  and  Globalization". 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


551 


forces  and  efficient  sanctions  to  combat  draft-evading  and  desertion.16 
Nineteenth-century  Ottoman  modernization  achieved  a  certain  amount  of 
progress  in  these  respects,  but  never  to  the  extent  that  would  bring  about 
remarkable  success.  There  were  severe  geographical  differences.  The  system 
almost  never  worked  in  the  economically  underdeveloped  regions  where 
the  infrastructural  power  of  the  state  was  quite  weak,  such  as  the  tribal 
Kurdish-populated  parts  of  southeastern  Anatolia  and  certain  regions  of 
the  Ottoman  Middle  East,  where  a  nomadic  lifestyle  was  still  dominant. 

Where  and  when  unable  to  implement  conscription  on  the  individual 
basis,  the  Ottoman  state  resorted  to  earlier  practices  in  such  regions,  such 
as  getting  into  contact  with  communal  or  tribal  leaders  and  encouraging 
them  to  join  the  Ottoman  armed  forces  by  forming  "volunteer"  units  from 
their  local  populations  under  their  own  leadership  in  return  for  certain 
political  and  material  gains  from  the  state.  One  of  the  best  examples  of  this 
practice  was  the  Hamidiye  Cavalry  Regiments,  which  were  established  by 
Abdulhamid  II  (r.  1876-1909),  but  also  continued  in  different  forms  through 
the  Great  War.  This  was  an  irregular  militia  composed  of  select  Kurdish 
tribes.  The  basis  of  joining  this  militia  was,  at  least  in  principle,  voluntary. 
Besides  its  intended  function  as  being  an  auxiliary  force  in  the  region  acting 
on  behalf  of  the  Ottoman  state,  the  Hamidiye  was  also  a  part  of  a  larger 
sociopolitical  project  aimed  at  creating  a  special  bond  of  unity  between 
the  center  and  the  Kurds.  It  was  meant  to  "tie  the  empire  more  firmly  to 
its  Muslim  roots  and  provide  a  defense  against  Russia  and  the  Armenians, 
both  increasingly  aggressive  after  1878,  and  the  Kurds  could  be  used  as  a 
balance  against  the  urban  notables  and  the  provincial  governments".17  On 
the  other  hand,  some  regions  where  the  state  not  only  lacked  the  capacity  to 
control  but  also  did  not  have  "reliable"  connections  with  local  leaders,  such 
as  Yemen,  were  completely  left  out  of  the  Ottoman  system  both  formally 
and  informally. 

The  Ottoman  conscription  system  was  discriminatory.  The  system  had  a 
marked  religious  character  and  always  remained  predominantly  Muslim  in 
practice.  While  the  universality  of  conscription  was  accepted  in  principle, 
in  practice  the  focus  of  the  systme  was  on  the  Muslim  Ottomans.  In  fact, 
the  Ottoman  military  reform  can  be  described  as  "the  re-construction 
of  a  Muslim  army".18  In  this  sense,  Ottoman  conscription  served  the  re- 

16  Lucassen  and  Ziircher,  "Introduction",  p.  10. 

17  Olson,  The  Emergence  of  Kurdish  Nationalism  and  the  Sheikh  Said  Rebellion,  p.  8.  See  also 
Van  Bruinessen,  Agha,  Shaikh  and  State;  Klein,  "Power  in  the  Periphery". 

18  Aksan,  "Ottoman  Recruitment  in  the  Late  Eighteenth  Century",  p.  22. 


552 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


Islamization  of  Ottoman  identity  rather  than  creating  a  secular  Ottoman 
citizenry.  This  does  not  mean  that  there  were  no  non-Muslim  soldiers  in 
the  Ottoman  armed  forces.  In  certain  specific  positions  in  which  there 
were  not  enough  Muslims,  such  as  medical  officers,  the  Ottoman  Arme- 
nians, Greeks,  and  Jews  were  welcome  in  the  army,  and  held  the  ranks 
of  lieutenant  and  captain.19  As  for  enlisted  men  too,  in  some  cases,  such 
as  the  navy,  non-Muslims  were  enlisted  in  the  Ottoman  armed  forces  as 
early  as  the  1830s.20  But  such  examples  were  usually  related  to  the  specific 
needs  of  the  Ottoman  military  at  certain  times,  and  they  never  constituted 
a  standardized  common  practice  integrated  into  the  system.  However, 
non-Muslims  were  not  totally  excluded;  on  the  contrary,  they  were  always 
kept  within  the  system,  but  in  a  discriminatory  way.21  The  Reform  Decree 
(Islahat  Fermani)  of  1856  extended  the  obligation  of  military  service  to 
non-Muslims  but  allowed  for  exemption  upon  payment  of  a  fee.  Buying 
exemptions  in  this  way  almost  became  the  norm  for  non-Muslims,  and 
the  exemption  fee  in  practice  replaced  the  cizye,  the  tax  that  Islamic  law 
required  of  non-Muslims.22  The  extent  of  the  exemption  fee  was  restricted 
in  the  legislations  of  1909  and  1914,  but  it  never  disappeared  entirely. 

While  the  application  of  the  exemption  fee  was  more  standardized  for 
non-Muslims,  the  method  of  buying  exemption  was  not  closed  to  Muslims, 
either.  But  it  was  not  just  that  this  option  offered  to  Muslims  was  often 
revised  with  new  regulations;  in  addition,  the  payment  that  they  had  to 
make  was  much  higher  (it  was  50  gold  liras  after  1870),  and  only  quite  rich 
Muslims  could  afford  it.23  So,  conscription  was  unequal  in  economic  terms, 
too.  The  burden  of  actually  serving  in  the  army  almost  always  fell  on  the 
poor  in  general  and  peasants  in  particular. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  universality  of  military  service  did  not  mean  that 
all  able-bodied  Muslim  males  of  military  age  would  be  obliged  to  serve  in 
the  military,  either.  For  various  pragmatic  reasons,  there  was  an  extensive 
system  of  exemptions  for  Muslim  Ottomans  as  well.  Until  more  restrictive 
regulations  were  put  into  effect  in  1909  and  1914  as  well  as  during  the  Great 
War,  many  categories  of  Muslims  in  the  empire  had  the  right  to  be  exempt 

19  Ziircher,  "The  Ottoman  Conscription  System  in  Theory  and  Practice",  p.  89. 

20  Heinzelmann,  Cihaddan  Vatan  Savunmasma,  p.  206. 

21  On  the  history  of  the  conscription  of  Ottoman  non-Muslims,  see  Giilsoy,  Osmanli  Gay- 
rimiislimlerinin  Askerlik  Seriiveni. 

22  Heinzelmann,  Cihaddan  Vatan  Savunmasma,  p.  250. 

23  Ziircher,  "The  Ottoman  Conscription  System  in  Theory  and  Practice",  p.  87.  There  was  also 
the  option  of  personal  replacement  to  avoid  service,  but  this  method  disappeared  relatively 
early. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


553 


from  military  service.  These  included  religious  functionaries,  medrese 
students,  Muslim  residents  of  Istanbul  and  the  Hijaz  province  (the  holy 
cities  of  Mecca  and  Medina),  high-  and  even  middle-ranking  bureaucrats, 
much  needed  skilled  laborers,  and  males  who  were  the  only  breadwinners 
of  their  families. 

Was  there  an  ethnic  dimension  in  Ottoman  conscription  in  the  sense  of 
being  based  on  a  certain  ethnicity  and  excluding  others?  There  were  certain 
"ethnic"  preferences,  but  it  is  hard  to  say  that  the  Ottoman  conscription 
system  had  a  clear  ethnic  dimension  from  the  beginning.  Discrimination 
was  based  on  religion  rather  than  ethnicity.  But  it  should  be  noted  that 
there  was  an  ethnic  hierarchy  in  Ottoman  conscription.  The  Anatolian 
Muslim  population  (Turks,  Kurds,  Circassians,  and  Laz)  in  general  and  the 
Turkish  element  in  particular  constituted  the  backbone  of  the  Ottoman 
military.  The  "dominance"  of  the  Turkish  element  was  evident  as  early  as 
during  the  military  reforms  Mahmud  II.24  This  element  was  preferred  as 
the  most  trusted  group  in  attempts  to  make  the  state  more  centralized  and 
to  subject,  for  example,  "peripheral"  Arab  provinces  to  the  centralization 
process.  The  ethnic  core  of  the  new  Ottoman  army  established  by  Mahmud 
II  was  "made  up  of  'Turks',  the  Turk  u§agi  (Turkish  lads')  which  Ottoman 
commanders  increasingly  saw  as  the  most  reliable,  most  malleable  cannon 
fodder".25  The  Ottoman  state  always  tried  to  integrate  its  Arab  population 
into  its  military,  but  a  certain  amount  of  ambivalence  towards  and  distrust 
of  the  Arabs  also  always  existed,  reaching  unprecedented  levels  during  the 
Great  War.26 

Was  the  Ottoman  conscription  system  popular?  It  is  evident  that  the 
system  had  to  cope  with  occasional  major  resistance  coming  from  various 
segments  of  society.  First  of  all,  it  should  be  noted  that,  while  the  system  was 
discriminatory  against  non-Muslims,  there  was  no  particular  enthusiasm 
on  the  part  of  the  latter  about  serving  in  the  Ottoman  armed  forces,  either. 
It  is  true  that  since  inclusion  into  obligatory  military  service  would  provide 
certain  political  gains  and  an  increase  in  status,  leading  to  full  citizen- 
ship, various  political  or  religious  representatives  of  the  Ottoman  Greeks, 
Armenians,  and  Jews  often  expressed  official  approval  of  the  extension  of 
obligatory  military  service  to  their  communities.  For  example,  an  influen- 

24  The  Turkish  element  here  refers  to  a  sociological  category,  rather  than  an  ethnic  one.  This 
category  had  certain  common  characteristics,  the  most  determining  of  which  were  being  Muslim 
(mostly  Sunni  Muslim),  speaking  Turkish,  and  preferably  being  settled  (not  being  nomadic). 

25  Aksan,  Ottoman  Wars,  7700-7870,  pp.  357-358;  Yildiz,  Neferin  Adi  Yok,  pp.  181-183. 

26  On  the  relations  between  the  Young  Turk  regime  and  the  Arabs,  see  Kayah,  Arabs  and  Young 
Turks. 


554 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


tial  Armenian  political  figure,  Krikor  Zohrab,  a  deputy  from  Istanbul  in 
the  Ottoman  parliament  after  1908,  considered  the  equal  military  service 
obligation  as  an  important  step  towards  the  creation  of  a  solid  Ottoman 
citizenship  and  described  it  as  "a  matter  of  brotherhood".27  Similarly,  the 
Grand  Rabbi  of  the  Jewish  community,  Haim  Nahum  Efendi,  who  had  had 
political  ties  with  the  Young  Turks  since  the  preparation  for  the  1908  Revolu- 
tion, openly  supported  the  idea  of  obligatory  military  service  for  Ottoman 
Jews  and  worked  to  convince  his  congregation  in  this  respect.28  But  this 
remained  merely  official  rhetoric  to  a  great  extent.  Ordinary  members  and 
potential  draftees  of  these  communities  usually  showed  reluctance  about 
conscription.  Draft-evasion  and  desertion  of  Ottoman  non-Muslims  were 
common  problems.29 

Nor  was  resistance  to  conscription  a  problem  unique  to  the  non-Muslim 
Ottomans.  Similar  forms  of  resistance  also  occasionally  appeared  on  the  part 
of  the  Muslim  Ottomans.  Draft-evasion  and  desertion  by  Muslims  increased 
especially  after  the  1909  regulations  which  restricted  the  exemption  status 
of  many  Muslim  groups.  For  example,  the  decision  to  draft  those  medrese 
students  who  failed  to  pass  their  exams  in  time  made  many  people,  not  just 
the  medrese  students,  quite  unhappy,  because  there  had  been  many  fake 
medrese  students  (among  them  even  illiterate  peasants),  who  had  abused 
this  method  of  avoiding  military  service.30  Moreover,  the  move  to  draft  men 
from  the  regions  which  had  previously  remained  outside  the  recruitment 
system  also  caused  the  emergence  of  acts  of  resistance  in  those  regions. 
For  example,  after  the  1909  regulations,  the  Ottoman  state  had  to  deal  with 
occasional  rebellions  against  the  draft,  which  came  from  various  sections 
of  the  Laz  and  the  Kurds  in  Anatolia,  and  the  Arabs  in  Arab  provinces.31 
Similar  acts  of  resistance,  mostly  in  the  forms  of  draft-evasion  and  desertion, 
sometimes  also  appeared  on  the  part  of  the  Anatolian  Muslim-Turkish 
population,  the  backbone  of  the  Ottoman  army.  As  I  will  show,  such  forms 
of  resistance  constituted  a  serious  problem  during  the  Great  War. 


27  Koptas,,  "Mes,rutiyet  Doneminin  Umut  ve  UmutsuzlukSarkacinda  Ermeni  Devrimci  Partileri 
ve  Krikor  Zohrab",  pp.  73-74. 

28  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  Prelude  to  War,  pp.  153-154. 

29  Giilsoy,  Osmanli  Gayrimuslimlerinin  Askerlik  Seriiveni,  pp.  145-146. 

30  On  the  issue  of  conscripting  Ottoman  medrese  students,  see  Bein,  "Politics,  Military 
Conscription,  and  Religious  Education  in  the  Late  Ottoman  Empire". 

31  Shaw,  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  pp.  166-170. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


555 


Reforms  after  the  Balkan  defeat 

The  humiliating  defeat  of  the  Ottoman  army  in  the  Balkan  Wars  of  1912-1913 
led  the  Ottoman  authorities  to  conclude  that  it  was  urgently  necessary  to 
bring  in  "a  new  spirit  and  enthusiasm"  to  the  army,  for  which  an  overall 
reform  and  reorganization  in  the  army  was  needed.32  This  situation  was 
very  much  similar  to  the  discussions  for  a  major  overhaul  in  the  in  Russian 
military  after  the  defeat  in  the  Russo-Japanese  War  of  1905.33  Reforming  the 
army  was  a  primary  agenda  of  the  Committee  of  Union  and  Progress  (CUP) 
government  which  had  established  single-party  rule  in  1913.  After  less  than 
a  month,  the  Regulation  for  the  General  Organization  of  the  Military  was 
issued  on  14  February  1913  to  execute  organizational  reforms  concerning  the 
army.34  But  a  major  overhaul  began  to  take  place  when  Enver  Pasha,  the  lead- 
ing CUP  leader  in  military  affairs,  became  the  minister  of  war  on  3  January 
1914.35  This  process  also  included  a  foreign  contribution.  After  the  Ottoman 
state  signed  an  agreement  with  the  German  military  on  14  December  1913, 
the  German  Military  Mission,  under  the  leadership  of  Otto  Liman  von 
Sanders,  came  to  the  Ottoman  Empire  to  help  reform  the  armed  forces.36 
The  German  Military  Mission  provided  help  with  the  reorganization  of  the 
army,  and  also  offered  useful  advice  to  revise  the  conscription  system  and 
the  mobilization  plans  in  line  with  the  Prussian-German  experience.37  The 
German  contribution  to  Ottoman  mobilization  continued  after  the  secret 
treaty  of  alliance  signed  on  2  August  1914,  and  also  after  the  Ottoman  entry 
into  the  war  on  the  German  side  on  2  November  1914.38 

The  main  aim  of  the  process  was  to  create  a  highly  efficient  army  struc- 
ture, which  could  easily  and  rapidly  be  utilized  in  a  wartime  situation 
when  needed.  The  new  structuring  of  the  army  closely  and  significantly 

32  Tilrk  Silahli  Kuvvetleri  Tarihi,  III,  part  6  (1908-1920),  p.  192. 

33  Sanborn,  Drafting  the  Russian  Nation,  pp.  25-29. 

34  For  the  complete  text  of  the  regulation,  see  Osmanli  Ordu  Teskilati,  pp.  147-161. 

35  Enver  remained  at  this  post  through  the  end  of  the  war,  until  14  October  1918.  In  this  capacity 
during  this  period  he  also  served  as  the  acting  commanding  general  of  the  Ottoman  army  (the 
titular  commander-in-chief  was  the  sultan)  and  as  the  chief  of  the  General  Staff. 

36  Similar  agreements  were  also  made  with  other  European  countries  in  the  same  period.  The 
Ottomans  invited  a  British  mission  to  help  reform  the  navy  and  a  French  mission  to  improve  the 
gendarmerie.  But  the  British  and  French  missions  left  the  country  when  the  Great  War  began. 
See Birinci Dunya Harbinde  TurkHarbi,  I,  Osmanli  Imparatorlugu'nun  Siyasive Askeri Hazirliklan 
veHarbe  Girisi,  pp.  179-180. 

37  For  a  postwar  account  of  the  German  Military  Mission  by  a  German  officer-historian  who 
also  served  in  the  mission,  see  Miihlman,  Imparatorlugun  Sonu,  1974,  pp.  13-55. 

38  Strachan,  The  First  World  War,  p.  104. 


556 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


depended  on  the  recruitment  system  for  its  vitality,  and  required  a  large 
number  of  additional  troops  within  a  short  period  of  time.  In  other  words, 
in  order  for  the  new  army  structure  to  be  efficient,  there  needed  to  be  an 
efficient  conscription  system. 

The  new  structure  required  about  500,000  troops  in  total,  while  the 
number  of  the  available  troops  in  the  army  dropped  as  low  as  around 
200,000  in  1913  due  to  discharges  after  the  Balkan  Wars.39  According  to 
calculations  made  in  summer  1914,  a  total  of  477,868  drafted  men  and  12,469 
officers  were  needed  to  bring  the  army  to  full  wartime  capacity.40  To  cope 
with  the  demands  of  this  sudden  increase,  the  existing  conscription  system, 
which  had  been  characterized  by  many  setbacks  from  the  beginning  and 
functioned  unsatisfactorily  during  the  Balkan  Wars,  needed  to  be  revised 
and  reformed.  Moreover,  a  revision  in  the  conscription  system  was  needed 
also  because  the  manpower  pool  of  the  empire  was  considerably  reshaped 
after  the  Balkan  Wars.  In  addition  to  about  340,000  casualties41  and  subse- 
quent loss  of  territories  in  the  Balkans,  the  immigration  of  around  400,000 
Muslim  refugees'^  from  the  lost  territories  into  the  empire  also  changed 
the  demographic  composition  from  which  the  military  was  to  be  drawn. 

Under  these  circumstances,  a  new  law  for  military  service  was  issued 
on  12  May  1914. 43  The  main  concern  of  Ottoman  authorities  was  to  have  an 
efficient  recruitment  mechanism  which  would  improve  the  conditions 
for  an  eventual  mobilization.  The  new  law  aimed  to  tackle  the  problem 
of  exemptions.  The  1909  regulations  had  tried  to  make  revisions  in  this 
respect,  but  they  were  not  very  successful  in  practice.  The  new  law  of  1914 
aimed  to  minimize  exemptions,  allowing  only  for  really  necessary  ones. 
The  law  also  aimed  to  make  the  military  service  obligation  more  extensive 
in  drafting  more  segments  of  society  for  active  service,  including  the  non- 
Muslim  Ottomans.  While  a  discourse  of  Ottoman  equality  accompanied 
this  objective,  the  real  aim  was  more  pragmatic:  acquiring  the  maximum 
number  of  draftees.  In  accordance  with  the  aim  of  extending  the  obligation, 
there  was  also  the  intention  to  abolish,  or  at  least  restrict,  the  exemption  fee. 


39  Larcher,  La  guerre  turque  dans  la  guerre  mondiale,  p.  66. 

40  Erickson,  Ordered  to  Die,  p.  7. 

41  Erickson  estimates  that  the  number  of  total  Ottoman  casualties  during  the  Balkan  Wars 
was  about  340,000,  of  which  50,000  were  killed  in  action,  75,000  died  of  disease,  100,000  were 
wounded,  and  115,000  were  prisoners  of  war.  See  Erickson,  Defeat  in  Detail,  p.  329. 

42  MacCarthy,  Death  and  Exile,  p.  161. 

43  For  the  text  of  the  law,  see  Diistur,  series  II,  vol.  6,  pp.  662-704. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


557 


Mobilization  for  the  Great  War 

The  possibility  of  a  general  mobilization  became  reality  only  about  three 
months  after  the  announcement  of  the  law,  and  it  was  at  that  point  that 
the  actual  process  of  testing  began  for  the  above-mentioned  objectives.  The 
general  mobilization  was  declared  on  2  August  1914.  The  response  to  the 
call  to  arms  was  much  better  than  it  had  been  during  the  Balkan  Wars.  But 
it  was  not  consistent  geographically.  It  was  better  in  western  and  central 
Anatolia,  but  not  as  good  in  eastern  Anatolia  and  the  Arab  provinces.  The 
units  in  Yemen  and  Hijaz  (almost  the  entire  Arabian  peninsula)  were  never 
mobilized,  and  the  XI,  XII,  and  XIII  Corps,  which  were  stationed  in  eastern 
Anatolia,  Mosul,  and  Baghdad  respectively,  never  reach  their  intended 
effective  strength  due  to  the  high  amount  of  draft-evasion  and  desertion.44 

After  the  declaration  of  mobilization,  the  eligible  men  aged  from  twenty 
to  forty-five  were  called  up  for  service.45  But  these  initial  age  requirements 
became  insufficient  to  fill  in  the  gaps  in  manpower  in  the  armed  forces  as 
the  war  continued,  and  new  arrangements  were  made  in  the  following  years. 
For  example,  the  minimum  age  for  the  draft  dropped  to  as  low  as  eighteen 
on  29  April  1915 . 46  Then  the  maximum  age  for  recruitment  was  increased  to 
a  high  of  fifty  on  20  March  1916. 47  Moreover,  the  duration  of  military  service, 
which  was  two  years  in  peacetime,  was  also  extended  in  wartime  until  a 
special  order  was  issued  to  determine  when  it  would  end.48  In  practice  this 
meant  that  enlisted  men  would  have  to  serve  until  the  end  of  the  war.49 

According  to  estimates  from  the  Ottoman  War  Ministry  and  the  General 
Staff  at  the  beginning  of  the  mobilization,  the  empire  had  the  potential  to 
mobilize  about  2  million  men  for  service  within  a  single  year.  This  was  about 
10  per  cent  of  its  general  population,  which  was  close  to  23  million  on  the 
eve  of  the  war.50  However,  although  the  initial  level  of  the  Ottoman  state's 
recruitment  performance  could  be  considered  adequate,  this  estimate 
remained  a  distant  possibility  throughout  the  war.  The  number  of  troops 

44  Birinci Diinya Harbi'nde  TurkHarbi,  I,  p.  182. 

45  Turk  Silahti  Kuvvetleri,  III,  part  6,  p.  288;  Diistur,  series  II,  vol.  6,  p.  913. 

46  Diistur,  series  II,  vol.  7,  p.  589. 

47  Ibid.,  series  II,  vol.  8,  p.  730. 

48  The  Ottoman  Archives,  Istanbul  [henceforth,  BOA],  MV.,  196/116,  24  February  1915. 

49  BOA,  DH.MB.HPS.M.,  15/24, 8  July  1914. 

50  Of  these  23  million,  around  17  million  lived  within  the  borders  of  present-day  Turkey,  more 
than  3  million  in  Syria  and  Palestine  including  Lebanon  and  Jordan,  and  about  2.5  million  in 
present-day  Iraq.  Additionally,  about  5.5  million  lived  in  Yemen  and  Hijaz  under  Ottoman  rule. 
See  Pamuk,  "The  Ottoman  Economy  in  World  War  I",  112.  On  the  Ottoman  population  in  1914, 
see  also  Karpat,  Ottoman  Population,  1850-1914,  pp.  170-190. 


558 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


in  the  Ottoman  army  was  726,692  around  the  time  when  mobilization  was 
declared  (it  was  around  295,000  in  1913),  and  it  reached  as  many  as  780,282 
men  by  25  September  1914.51  According  to  the  official  statistics,  the  total 
number  of  drafted  men  cumulatively  increased  to  1,478,176  by  March  1915, 
and  reached  1,943,720  by  14  July  1915.  By  March  1916  it  increased  to  2,493,000 
and  by  March  1917  to  2,855,ooo.52  If  we  add  up  the  "volunteers"  including 
the  Kurdish  and  Bedouin  cavalry  volunteer  units,  the  number  of  which  is 
estimated  to  be  around  80,000-100,000,  the  cumulative  total  number  of  men 
mobilized  during  the  four  years  of  the  war  would  be  around  3,ooo,ooo.53 

The  Ottoman  effort  to  mobilize  men  for  war  declined  steadily  as  the  war 
prolonged,  and  it  suffered  some  serious  internal  problems  and  insufficien- 
cies. First  of  all,  there  was  the  problem  of  lack  of  standardization  among 
regions  regarding  recruitment.  In  practice,  the  conscription  system  did 
not  work  in  the  Ottoman  Middle  East.  While  it  remained  predominantly 
an  Anatolian  institution,  it  was  not  standard  in  Anatolia,  either.  Secondly, 
although  at  the  beginning  a  short  war  was  generally  expected,  the  Ottoman 
state  began  to  have  difficulty  in  sustaining  a  large-scale  and  permanent 
mobilization  as  the  war  continued.  And,  thirdly,  resistance  to  conscrip- 
tion in  the  forms  of  draft-evasion  and  desertion  became  a  major  problem 
especially  in  the  second  half  of  the  war.  As  the  war  necessitated  more  and 
more  military  labor,  the  actual  war  conditions  recurrently  required  changes 
in  the  conscription  system.  Where  the  formal  conscription  system  did  not 
function  sufficiently,  the  state  still  tried  to  acquire  necessary  manpower 
by  amalgamating  old  methods  of  recruitment  with  modern  conscription 
methods  and  creating  alternative  recruitment  categories.  Volunteers  consti- 
tuted such  an  alternative  category,  which  not  only  helped  the  state  mobilize 

51  Turk  Silahli  Kuvvetleri,  III,  part  6,  p.  290;  Tiirk  Silahli  Kuvvetleri  Tarihi,  X,  Osmanli  Devri, 
Birinci Diinya  Harbi,  Idari  Faaliyetlerve  Lojistik,  p.  102;  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War 
I,  I,  p.  148. 

52  Turk  Silahli  Kuvvetleri,  X,  pp.  164-165;  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  p.  148. 
See  also  the  Turkish  Military  Archives,  Ankara  [henceforth,  ATASE],  BDH,  Folder  62/File  309A/ 
Index  005. 

53  The  estimates  of  the  total  number  of  recruited  men  in  the  Ottoman  armed  forces  during  the 
Great  War  vary  in  secondary  sources.  For  example,  Ahmed  EminYalman  claimed  that  2,998,321 
men  were  enrolled  in  the  army  during  the  four  years  of  war.  See  Yalman,  Turkey  in  the  World 
War,  p.  252.  M.  Larcher,  who  claims  that  he  based  his  research  on  the  official  Ottoman  data, 
gives  a  figure  of  2,850,000  men  mobilized  during  the  war.  See  Larcher,  La  guerre  turque  dans  la 
guerre  mondiale,  p.  602.  The  most  recent  estimated  total  number  is  given  by  Edward  Erickson 
as  2,873,000,  which  he  has  reached  by  cross-checking  the  existing  statistical  data  published  in 
the  secondary  literature.  Erickson  also  breaks  up  the  total  figure  into  armed  service  classes: 
2,608,000  in  the  army,  250,000  in  the  gendarmerie,  and  15,000  in  the  navy.  See  Erickson,  Ordered 
to  Die,  p.  243. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


559 


those  segments  of  its  population  that  could  not  be  conscripted  formally 
due  to  infrastructural  problems,  but  also  provided  the  armed  forces  with 
additional  manpower  that  could  be  used  in  "special"  military  missions.54 

Volunteers  in  the  Ottoman  army:  irregular  conscripts  or  hired 
labor? 

The  use  of  volunteers  in  the  Ottoman  armed  forces,  a  practice  that  had 
already  been  applied  in  the  previous  wars,  became  more  systematic  dur- 
ing the  Great  War,  with  new  legal  and  practical  regulations.  There  were 
various  categories  of  volunteers,  each  of  which  was  supposed  to  serve  a 
distinct  purpose.  One  of  the  major  categories  was  tribal  volunteers.  Where 
the  formal  conscription  system  did  not  work,  the  state  tried  to  apply  the 
method  of  recruiting  people  as  "volunteers".  This  practice  mainly  targeted 
the  Kurdish  tribal  population  in  Anatolia.  Kurdish  tribal  volunteers  were 
usually  employed  as  separate  cavalry  forces  in  the  Great  War,  which  served 
as  auxiliary  units  on  the  fronts  that  were  near  their  native  regions,  such 
as  in  the  Caucasus  and  Mesopotamia.  Volunteerism  in  this  case  was  not 
individual-based:  the  state  entered  into  dialogue  with  tribal  or  community 
leaders,  such  as  local  chieftains,  sheikhs,  or  aghas.  The  latter  decided  on 
behalf  of  their  communities.  This  decision  was  itself  not  entirely  voluntary 
either,  because  it  had  to  be  made  under  political  pressure  from  the  central 
state,  though  it  promised  political  and  material  gains  in  return.  Obeying 
the  state's  call  for  volunteers  politically  meant  that  a  particular  tribal  com- 
munity expressed  compromise  with  the  central  authority.  In  return  for 
this  obedience,  the  central  authority  recognized  that  tribe  as  a  peripheral 
power-holder  and  allowed  it  a  certain  amount  of  autonomy  through  which 
that  tribe  could  regenerate  its  power  in  its  local  setting.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  volunteers  who  were  recruited  this  way  did  not  actually  act  according 
to  their  own  will,  although  they  were  called  "volunteers". 

Muslim  immigrants  and  refugees  (muhacirs)  constituted  another  major 
category  of  volunteers,  who  were  employed  both  for  guerrilla  operations 
and  in  the  regular  units.  The  Muslims  who  were  forced  to  emigrate  because 
of  invasion  or  political  oppression  in  various  territories  of  Russia  and  the 
Balkans  had  reshaped  the  demographic  composition  of  the  Ottoman  Empire 
since  the  late  nineteenth  century.  Their  numbers  particularly  increased 

54  For  a  detailed  social  history  of  the  Ottoman  mobilization  during  the  Great  War,  see  Besikci, 
Between  Voluntarism  and  Resistance. 


560 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


with  the  influx  of  hundreds  of  thousands  of  Muslims  from  the  former 
Ottoman  territories  in  the  Balkans  into  Anatolia  after  the  Balkan  Wars 
of  1912-1913.  As  far  as  the  obligation  for  military  service  was  concerned, 
the  muhacirs  in  the  Ottoman  lands  had  to  fulfill  the  requirements  of  the 
Ottoman  conscription  system  to  acquire  full  Ottoman  citizenship  status. 
However,  the  Ottoman  state  tended  to  provide  a  degree  of  flexibility  to  these 
newcomers  in  order  to  make  their  process  of  settlement  and  adaptation 
easier.  This  flexibility  also  covered  those  muhacirs  who  had  previously 
been  the  subjects  of  the  Ottoman  state,  who  immigrated  into  Anatolia 
from  the  ex-Ottoman  territories  in  the  Balkans.  Article  135  of  the  Law  for 
Military  Service  of  1914  determined  that  all  past  and  future  muhacirs  would 
be  subject  to  the  military  service  procedure  six  years  from  the  date  they 
arrived  in  the  empire.  Consequently,  during  the  Great  War  when  almost  all 
able-bodied  males  of  the  empire  were  already  conscripted  in  the  military, 
the  male  population  of  such  muhacirs  provided  an  attractive  source  of 
energetic  volunteer  fighters  for  the  Ottoman  armed  forces.  When  the  Ot- 
toman state  expected  them  to  volunteer,  they  also  tended  to  respond  to 
this  call  positively  for  various  reasons.  Volunteering  for  the  armed  forces 
would  confirm  their  rights  to  be  granted  land  and  status  in  the  Ottoman 
territory  and  expedite  their  integration  into  Ottoman  society.  Volunteering 
would  open  up  new  channels  for  muhacirs  to  engage  in  dialogue  with  the 
Ottoman  state,  a  dialogue  which  would  further  establish  their  legitimate 
existence  in  the  Ottoman  Empire  and  increase  their  status. 

The  Ottoman  state's  appeal  to  muhacir  populations  to  mobilize  vol- 
unteers was  shaped  by  the  specific  conditions  and  objectives  of  military 
campaigns  on  a  particular  front.  As  far  as  the  Caucasus  front  was  concerned, 
for  example,  former  Muslim  residents  of  the  Caucasus  and  the  Laz  people  of 
the  eastern  Black  Sea  region  were  most  preferred.  Thus,  the  Ottomans  tried 
to  mobilize  Circassian  muhacirs  who  had  settled  in  Anatolian  provinces 
and  in  Syria  during  the  previous  decades.55  These  muhacirs  would  be  useful 
in  two  ways:  first,  they  were  familiar  with  the  mountainous  geographical 
conditions  of  the  region  and,  secondly,  "they  had  come  into  the  empire 
because  they  been  driven  out  of  their  homes  by  the  Russians,  so  they  were 
particularly  interested  in  joining  the  Ottoman  forces  that  were  attempting 
to  regain  control  of  the  lands  that  they  had  been  forced  to  leave".56  The 
sentiment  of  revenge  was  a  major  motivating  factor  in  their  mobilization. 


55  BOA,  DH.EUM.EMN.,  89/14,  29  July  1914. 

56  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  p.  157. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


561 


The  third  major  category  of  volunteers  included  individually  recruited 
volunteers,  who  would  be  used  in  "irregular"  warfare,  such  as  in  the  armed 
bands  of  the  Special  Organization  (Te§kilat-iMahsusa),  a  secret  paramilitary 
intelligence  organization  founded  by  Enver  Pasha  soon  before  the  war 
on  the  model  of  Balkan  paramilitary  groups  (especially  the  Bulgarian 
IMRO).57  The  Special  Organization  not  only  undertook  a  major  role  in  car- 
rying out  propaganda  activities  to  attain  support  from  Muslim  populations 
in  India,  Russia,  Iran,  and  Egypt  for  the  Ottoman  holy  war  (cihad),  but 
also  engaged  in  guerrilla  warfare  on  major  fronts  throughout  the  war.  The 
Special  Organization  also  carried  out  operations  to  intimidate  the  local 
non-Muslim  Ottoman  population  in  Anatolia,  particularly  the  Armenians, 
on  the  pretext  that  the  organization  acted  as  a  counterinsurgency  force 
against  disloyal  elements  of  the  Armenian  population,  some  of  whom,  after 
evading  the  draft  or  deserting  the  army,  formed  their  own  armed  bands 
and  voluntarily  joined  the  Russian  army58  But  this  mission  of  the  Special 
Organization  took  the  form  of  direct  abuses  of,  attacks  on,  and  massacres 
of  civilian  Armenians  during  their  forced  migration  in  1915. 59  Though  no 
precise  statistical  data  are  available,  the  Special  Organization  is  said  to  have 
raised  as  many  as  30,000  fighters  at  its  height,  most  of  whom  consisted  of 
prisoner-volunteers.60  Convicted  prisoners,  who  were  ready  to  be  used  in 
any  form  of  violent  operation  in  return  for  their  release  and  also  certain 
material  gain,  constituted  one  of  the  main  sources  of  such  volunteers.  Many 
prisoners  from  various  jails  across  Anatolia  applied  to  become  volunteers  to 

57  Stoddard,  "The  Ottoman  Government  and  the  Arabs".  For  more  on  the  Special  Organization, 
see  also  Cemil,  Birinci Diinya  Savasi'nda  Teskildt-i  Mahsusa;  Sencer,  Turkish  Battle  at  Khaybar; 
Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  pp.  353-456. 

58  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  p.  354.  On  the  Armenian  volunteers  in  the  Rus- 
sian army,  see  Gorganian,  "Armenian  Participation  in  World  War  I  on  the  Caucasian  Front".  There 
are  also  examples  showing  that  some  Ottomanjews  and  Greeks  voluntarily  joined  the  Entente 
powers.  For  an  example  of  the  case  of  Ottomanjews  volunteering  for  the  French  army,  see  BOA, 
HR.SYS.,  2403/7,  20  September  1914.  For  two  examples  of  Ottoman  Greeks  volunteering  for  the 
British  and  Greek  armies,  see  BOA,  DH.EUM.3.§b.,  5/19,  29  April  1915  and  BOA,  DH.EUM.34b., 
8/61, 13  September  1915. 

59  Yalman,  Turkey  in  the  World  War,  p.  220;  Akcam,  "Ermeni  Meselesi  Hatlotunmustur",  168-180. 
In  contrast,  Guenter  Lewy  has  argued  that  the  incomplete  character  of  the  available  documents 
does  not  allow  us  to  attribute  all  of  the  abuses  against  the  Armenians  to  the  Special  Organiza- 
tion -  although  he  has  not  denied  the  existence  of  convicted  criminals  in  the  armed  bands  and 
has  confirmed  the  attacks  of  "irregulars"  or  "volunteers"  against  the  Armenian  deportees.  Lewy 
has  also  written  that  Kurdish  irregular  and  volunteer  forces,  as  well  as  Circassian  volunteers, 
played  a  considerable  role  in  the  massacres  ofthe  Armenian  deportees.  See  Lewy,  The  Armenian 
Massacres  in  Ottoman  Turkey,  pp.  82-89,  221-228. 

60  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  373;  BOA,  DH.§FR.,  46/134, 1  November  1914. 


562 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


fight  in  the  armed  bands  (getes)  of  the  Special  Organization  when  official 
announcements  were  made  that  prisoner-volunteers  would  be  accepted 
for  guerrilla  fighting.61  These  armed  bands,  which  can  also  be  regarded  as 
militia  units,  were  loosely  connected  to  the  Ottoman  military's  chain  of 
command  (the  commanders  of  some  were  provided  by  the  army),  and  they 
acted  autonomously  in  practice. 

It  can  be  argued  that,  when  the  demand  for  military  labor  was  so  high, 
authorities  could  consider  it  quite  legitimate  to  acquire  the  locked-in 
manpower  that  could  potentially  contribute  to  the  war  effort.  Theoreti- 
cally, like  other  enlisted  men,  the  volunteers  were  required  to  comply  with 
the  existing  conscription  regulations  from  the  moment  they  joined  the 
armed  forces.  This  included  their  duration  of  service.  No  volunteers  were 
supposed  to  leave  service  during  the  war  unless  there  was  a  demobilization 
order,  which  in  practice  meant  they  had  to  serve  until  the  end  of  the  war. 
However,  the  available  evidence  implies  that  maintaining  discipline  among 
the  volunteers,  especially  the  tribal  volunteer  units  which  were  usually 
used  as  separate  units,  sometimes  became  a  serious  problem.  Desertions 
were  particularly  widespread  among  them,  especially  among  the  tribal 
volunteers  on  the  Caucasus  front.62 

On  the  other  hand,  while  the  law  obliged  them  to  act  like  conscripts 
in  theory,  there  was  also  an  aspect  of  commodification  involved  in  this 
process.  Many  volunteers  actually  served  as  paid  soldiers,  because  they 
received  payment  from  the  state  in  either  an  explicit  or  an  implicit  way. 
The  volunteers  who  were  employed  in  the  Special  Organization's  missions 
either  received  regular  money  payments  from  the  discretionary  fund  of  the 
Ottoman  military  budget  or  were  promised  material  benefits  in  return  for 
their  service,  which  was  indeed  a  motivation  for  many  people  (especially 
for  prisoners)  to  become  willing  to  join  the  Special  Organization's  armed 
bands  as  voluntary  fighters.63  At  the  very  least,  being  a  volunteer  in  such 
an  armed  band  could  secure  a  free  subsistence  throughout  the  war  years, 
since  the  provisions  of  such  armed  bands  (at  least  those  on  the  Caucasus 
front)  were  legally  decided  to  be  provided  by  the  local  population  in  the 
form  of  a  "donation"  (iane).64  This  situation  gave  the  members  of  armed 

61  BOA,  DH.§FR.,  46/134, 1  November  1914. 

62  For  example,  it  was  reported  that,  after  the  battle  of  Kopriikoy  in  November  1914,  the  number 
of  Kurdish  tribal  volunteers  in  the  Third  Army,  which  was  around  20,000  at  the  beginning, 
dramatically  dwindled  to  around  3,000  because  of  desertions.  See  Aytar,  Hamidiye  Alaylarmdan 
Koy  Korucuiuguna,  pp.  140-141. 

63  Cemil,  Birinci Diinya  Sava§i'nda  Te§kildt-i  Mahsusa,  p.  118. 

64  Ibid.,  pp.  85-86;  BOA,  DH.STR.,  61/88, 23  February  1916. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


563 


bands  the  de  facto  right  to  act  as  if  they  were  war-tax  collectors  and  put 
pressure  on  civilians  for  this  purpose.  They  were  also  effectively  entitled 
to  seize  "booty"  during  their  raids  in  enemy  territory,  mostly  in  the  form 
of  livestock.65  Money  payments  and  material  rewards  were  also  involved 
in  the  Ottoman  state's  relationship  with  the  tribal  volunteer  groups  as  a 
means  of  encouraging  such  groups  to  volunteer  and  of  maintaining  their 
loyalty  to  the  state.66 

Can  the  volunteers  who  were  paid  or  received  material  benefits  be 
regarded  as  a  kind  of  professional  soldier  and  be  placed  in  the  category  of 
free  labor?  It  is  hard  to  say  that  they  fit  neatly  into  this  category  because 
there  was  no  contract  between  them  and  the  military  authorities.  Moreover, 
payments  were  usually  made  on  an  ad  hoc  basis,  on  the  initiative  of  army 
commanders  or  militia  leaders,  and  one  can  hardly  speak  of  a  standard 
procedure  in  this  respect.  The  situation  was  more  complex  in  the  case  of 
tribal  volunteers,  since  it  was  the  tribal  leader  who  conducted  the  negotia- 
tion with  and  personally  received  the  payment  from  military  authorities; 
ordinary  members  of  tribal  volunteer  units  had  no  say  in  this  process  and, 
although  they  might  receive  a  share  of  their  leaders'  payment,  their  case 
still  remained  close  to  the  category  of  "unfree  labor".  And,  as  mentioned 
above,  the  law  wanted  to  oblige  them  to  comply  with  the  conscription 
regulations.  But  it  is  obvious  that  this  compliance  clause  did  not  make  them 
conscripts  perse,  and  it  is  equally  hard  to  fit  them  in  the  conscript  labor 
category.  Instead  it  was  an  amalgamation  of  both  forms,  which  resulted  in 
a  pragmatic  form  that  included  aspects  of  both  categories. 

Here  it  is  also  interesting  to  note  that,  although  their  numbers  were  few 
(statistically  negligible),  the  Ottoman  army  also  employed  professional 
foreign  soldiers  who  served  for  money  during  the  Great  War.  A  well-known 
example  is  the  Venezuelan  officer  Rafael  de  Nogales  (1879-1936).  After  his 
attempts  to  join  various  European  armies  (French,  Belgian)  failed,  he  ap- 
plied in  1915  to  serve  in  the  Ottoman  army  as  an  officer.  He  served  on  the 
Caucasus  and  Mesopotamia  fronts,  first  as  a  captain  and  then  major.67 


65  Cemil,  Birinci Diinya  Savasi'nda  Teskildt-i  Mahsusa,  pp.  48,  59. 

66  Askeri  Tarih  Belgeleri  Dergisi,  no.  117  (January  2004),  Document  no.  43,  p.  124. 

67  He  published  his  memoirs  in  1926,  in  which  he  gave  significant  details  about  daily  life  in 
the  Ottoman  army  and  presented  his  observations  about  social  life  in  the  localities  where  he 
served.  See  de  Nogales,  Four  Years  beneath  the  Crescent. 


564 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


Unskilled  vs.  skilled  labor?  The  problem  of  exemptions 

Whereas  the  Ottoman  conscription  system  had  been  characterized  by  a 
long  list  of  exemptions,  Ottoman  authorities  were  determined  in  1914  to 
restrict  every  "unnecessary"  exemption.  However,  while  this  resolution 
was  never  abandoned  during  the  war,  it  needed  to  be  reshaped  and  revised 
under  the  actual  conditions  of  mobilization  and  due  to  political  prefer- 
ences, financial  necessities,  and  the  need  for  technical-skilled  labor  in  the 
economic  and  bureaucratic  sectors.  Therefore,  as  some  exemptions  were 
abolished,  others  remained  in  operation  and  sometimes  new  exemptions 
were  introduced.  The  Ottoman  Great  War  experience  shows  that,  although 
military  service  was  legally  declared  universal,  there  was  still  a  general 
division  of  labor  regulating  who  would  be  employed  in  a  military  and  who 
in  a  nonmilitary  function,  even  when  meeting  the  need  of  military  labor 
was  the  utmost  priority.  Those  whose  civilian  skills  were  considered  more 
useful  and  important  than  the  service  they  would  provide  on  the  battlefield 
were  granted  exemptions  and  allowed  to  remain  in  their  post  during  the 
war.  Generally  speaking,  the  obligation  of  military  service  actually  fell  on 
the  shoulders  of  those  who  were  providers  of  unskilled  manual  labor.  A 
similar  division  also  existed  between  the  rich  and  the  poor,  as  those  whose 
financial  contribution  was  regarded  as  more  significant  than  their  physical 
contribution  could  also  be  offered  an  alternative. 

While  some  forms  of  military  labor  (especially  in  the  case  of  professional 
armies)  are  based  on  making  a  payment  to  the  military  laborer,  the  system 
of  conscription  may  sometimes  require  the  opposite:  the  potential  military 
laborer  himself  is  needed  to  make  a  payment  to  the  state  to  avoid  service. 
The  issue  of  the  exemption  fee,  which  stood  at  the  junction  of  the  state's 
political  preferences  and  financial  needs,  constituted  a  major  portion  of 
the  exemptions  in  the  Ottoman  conscription  system.  But  the  exemption 
fee  always  remained  in  effect  in  practice,  and  the  state  in  actuality  did  not 
want  to  press  too  hard  to  abolish  it.  The  Ottoman  state  never  dared  to  risk 
this  extra  source  of  financial  revenue,  which  served  to  alleviate  its  financial 
burdens.  Moreover,  its  continuation  was  not  regarded  as  so  disturbing  by 
those  who  paid  it,  namely  the  middle  and  upper  strata  of  Ottoman  non- 
Muslims,  who  did  not  have  a  long  history  of  military  service  in  the  Ottoman 
Empire  and  were  never  particularly  enthusiastic  about  revisions  after  1909 
aiming  to  include  them  into  the  active  service  obligation.68 

68  On  this  reluctance  of  Ottoman  non-Muslims  after  the  1909  Regulations,  see  Giilsoy,  Osmanli 
Gayrimuslimlerinin  Askerlik  Seriiveni,  pp.  141-148.  On  the  reluctance  of  Ottoman  non-Muslim 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


565 


This  general  approach  of  the  Ottoman  state  to  the  exemption  fee  can 
be  said  to  have  continued  during  the  Great  War,  while  some  significant 
modifications  were  made.  Parallel  to  the  official  discourse  from  1909,  it 
was  announced  in  1914  that  the  abolition  of  the  exemption  fee  was  among 
the  main  targets  of  the  new  legal  and  organizational  reforms  regarding 
the  conscription  system.69  But  the  points  which  this  discourse  needed  to 
emphasize  to  justify  itself  acquired  different  dimensions  after  the  declara- 
tion of  mobilization.  While  the  language  of  Ottomanism  which  stressed  the 
abolition  of  the  exemption  fee  as  a  way  of  equating  Muslim  and  non-Muslim 
Ottomans  through  including  them  into  the  same  military  service  obligation 
continued  to  some  extent,  the  discourse  now  also  needed  to  address  certain 
sources  of  discontent  in  the  public  sphere  concerning  the  unequal  treatment 
of  different  economic  classes  in  society.  The  "National  Economy"  policies  of 
the  CUP  government  offered  many  economic  opportunities  and  privileges 
to  the  Muslim-Turkish  elements  of  the  empire  and,  apparently,  a  consider- 
able number  of  well-off  Muslims  began  to  use  the  exemption  fee  option 
by  the  late  1914.70  This  seems  to  have  led  to  rumors  that  the  conscription 
system  favored  the  rich  and  that  the  burden  of  defending  the  fatherland 
was  imposed  on  the  shoulders  of  the  poor.  Therefore,  in  propagating  their 
intention  to  abolish  the  exemption  fee,  Ottoman  authorities  needed  to 
emphasize  that  the  rich  were  obligated  to  serve  in  the  armed  forces  as 
much  as  the  poor:  "Now  the  most  genteel  and  the  richest  would  defend 
their  motherland  in  the  same  way  as  the  poor  peasant  little  Mehmeds  [...] 
What  an  honor!"71 

But  neither  the  new  law  on  military  service  nor  the  mobilization  regula- 
tions could  abolish  the  exemption  fee  entirely.  And  the  class  dimension  of 
the  conscription  system,  namely  the  inequality  in  military  service  caused 
by  economic  inequality,  continued.  But  certain  restrictions  applied.72  First 
of  all,  from  now  on,  paying  an  exemption  fee  instead  of  actively  serving  in 
the  armed  forces  did  not  mean  that  the  payer  would  be  exempted  forever. 
Article  121  of  the  new  law  required  that,  even  if  a  person  paid  an  exemption 
fee,  he  was  required  to  get  basic  military  training  for  six  months  in  the 
nearest  infantry  division.  The  law  also  stipulated  that,  while  the  exemption 

recruits  during  the  Balkan  War  of  1912-1913,  see  Adanir,  "Non-Muslims  in  the  Ottoman  Army 
and  the  Ottoman  Defeat  in  the  Balkan  War  of  1912-1913". 

69  Behic,  Mukellefiyet-i  Askeriye  Kanun-i  Muvakkatinin  Izahi,  p.  7. 

70  On  the  "National  Economy"  policies  in  this  period,  see  Toprak,  Tiirkiye'de  Milli  Iktisat, 
igo8-igi8. 

71  Behic,  Mukellefiyet-i  Askeriye  Kanun-i  Muvakkatinin  Izahi,  p.  14. 

72  Ibid.,  p.  14. 


566 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


fee  remained  in  effect,  it  would  be  available  only  in  peacetime  and  nobody 
would  be  given  this  option  in  wartime.73 

But  not  only  did  the  exemption  fee  continue  after  the  mobilization  was 
declared  and  during  the  war,  various  of  its  restrictions  were  also  loosened. 
Initial  statements  that  condemned  the  practice  would  have  to  compromise 
with  actual  war  conditions  and  be  modified  time  and  time  again.  For  ex- 
ample, the  new  law  on  the  exemption  fee,  which  was  enacted  on  6  March 
1915,  confirmed  that  the  practice  would  continue  in  war  conditions.74  The 
practice  did  not  disappear  during  the  war  and  was  legally  renewed  with 
some  modifications.75 

While  the  mobilization  during  the  Great  War  made  military  labor  top 
priority,  the  need  for  skilled  labor  in  various  departments  of  the  state  bu- 
reaucracy and  economy  was  no  less  pressing.  To  keep  its  large  bureaucratic 
machine  running  during  the  war,  the  Ottoman  state  also  needed  to  exempt 
its  bureaucrats  and  officials  at  key  posts  from  conscription.  For  this  reason, 
according  to  Article  90  of  the  law  on  military  service,  even  if  they  were  at 
the  age  of  military  service,  state  employees  such  as  ministers,  top  officials, 
ambassadors,  governors,  judges,  and  muftis  were  not  obliged  to  serve  in  the 
armed  forces.  But,  more  importantly,  the  state  also  needed  its  middle-  and 
lower-ranking  civil  servants  and  technical  personnel  to  continue  their 
work  in  wartime,  as  their  job  description  now  also  included  supervising 
the  mobilization  process  in  their  localities,  as  well  as  fulfilling  their  routine 
work.  People  such  as  post  office  clerks  and  telegram  technicians,  bank 
clerks,  railway  technicians  and  clerks,  accountants,  policemen,  and  so 
forth  were  equally  indispensable  during  the  war.  Article  91  of  the  same  law 
included  a  long  and  detailed  list  of  middle-  and  low-ranking  civil  servants 
from  many  departments. 

However,  though  their  function  was  significant,  civil  servants  increas- 
ingly came  under  the  control  of  military  authorities  during  the  war.  The 
martial  law  situation,  which  continued  throughout  the  war,  gave  not  only  in 
practice  but  also  officially  the  ultimate  authority  to  military  commanders 
in  local  administration.  Although  the  mobilization  decree  gave  the  Interior 
Ministry  the  power  to  declare  martial  law,  it  was  the  War  Ministry  that 
actually  ran  all  things  military.76  This  created  a  process  in  which  state 
employees  in  the  provinces,  including  the  top  local  administrators,  were 

73  Ibid.,  p.  149. 

74  Diistur,  series  II,  vol.  7,  pp.  434-435. 

75  Ibid.,  series  II,  vol.  8,  pp.  380-381. 

76  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  p.  175. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


567 


required  to  obey  the  authority  of  military  commanders.  The  War  Ministry 
occasionally  stressed  this  requirement  in  its  correspondence  to  the  Interior 
Ministry,  whereupon  the  latter  needed  to  warn  its  local  officials  that  they 
should  have  considered  and  carried  out  the  measures  and  proposals  coming 
the  commanders.77  Recruitment  became  a  top  priority  in  which  civilian 
officials  were  expected  to  be  particularly  careful  during  the  war.  Civilian 
officials  of  the  provinces  were  repeatedly  warned  by  the  center  about  their 
crucial  function  in  ensuring  that  the  draft  procedure  was  carried  out  ef- 
ficiently in  their  localities.78 

The  law  on  military  service  also  provided  exemptions  for  religious 
functionaries  of  every  religion.  According  to  Article  91,  not  only  high-  and 
middle-ranking  religious  representatives  of  all  religious  communities  in 
the  empire,  but  also  low-ranking  ones,  were  exempted,  including  priests, 
monks,  and  deacons  (who  had  a  certificate)  for  the  Christians,  and  rab- 
bis and  deputy  rabbis  for  the  Jews.  For  the  Muslim  low-ranking  religious 
functionaries,  the  exemption  list  was  more  detailed.  It  was  stipulated  that 
for  each  mosque,  one  imam,  one  Quran  reciter  (hafiz),  one  call-to-prayer 
reciter  (muezzin),  and  one  caretaker  (kayyim)  would  be  released  from  the 
military  service  obligation. 

Apparently,  the  Ottoman  state  was  relatively  flexible  in  the  case  of  reli- 
gious functionaries  and  provided  them  with  an  exemption  status,  especially 
where  Muslim  religious  functionaries  were  concerned.  Of  course,  there 
were  reasons  for  this.  Obviously,  this  flexibility  did  not  stem  only  from 
the  concern  for  providing  uninterrupted  religious  service  for  believers 
in  wartime.  Low-ranking  religious  functionaries,  particularly  the  village 
imam,  also  played  a  crucial  role  in  mobilizing  men  for  the  war.  Through  his 
sermons,  and  as  a  respected  personage  among  the  local  community,  the 
imam  was  the  key  figure  in  justifying  the  military  service  as  a  sacred  duty. 
He  was  the  one  whom  local  people  took  most  seriously  about  the  exaltation 
of  martyrdom  in  war.  The  imam  was  also  influential  in  convincing  draft- 
evaders  and  deserters  to  rejoin  the  armed  forces.  Therefore,  since  the  imam 
was  regarded  as  one  of  the  main  propagators  and  motivators  of  the  Ottoman 
mobilization  at  the  grass-roots  level,  their  exemption  status  ensured  that 
enough  of  them  were  available  in  every  locality. 


77  BOA,  DH.§FR.,  55/157,  22  August  1915. 

78  BOA,  DH.§FR.,  42/155, 30  June  1914. 


568 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


Forced  labor  through  conscription?  The  labor  battalions 

Whereas  the  efforts  that  were  made  in  1914  to  minimize  exemptions  and  to 
extend  the  military  service  obligation  to  all  elements  of  Ottoman  society 
were  interpreted  by  some  observers  as  a  step  towards  the  principle  of  Otto- 
man citizenship  based  on  equality  (as  decreed  in  the  Ottoman  Constitution 
of  1876),79  such  a  perspective  of  equality  was  still  lacking  not  only  in  the 
legislation,  but  also  in  the  practice  of  mobilization.  The  Ottoman  perspec- 
tive regarding  the  inclusion  and  treatment  of  different  religious  and  ethnic 
elements  of  the  empire  into  the  conscription  system  during  the  Great  War 
was  based  on  an  understanding  of  Ottoman  unity  which  was  built  upon  a 
nationalist  pragmatism.  The  Ottoman  mobilization  effort  that  was  run  by 
the  nationalist  CUP  government  of  course  wished  to  include  and  make  use 
of  the  entire  population  of  the  empire.  But  this  wish  also  tended  to  thwart  as 
much  as  possible  any  political  expectations  and  demands  of  dialogue  with 
the  state,  which  would  emerge  on  the  part  of  the  same  elements  in  return 
for  their  participation  in  the  mobilization  effort.  Service  of  even  the  most 
distrusted  elements  could  be  accepted  by  the  CUP  government  as  long  as 
that  service  was  used  in  the  way  defined  by  the  government  itself  and  as 
long  as  that  service  did  not  produce  any  political  expectations  on  the  part 
of  the  providers. 

The  Law  on  Military  Service  of  1914  included  certain  ambiguities  that 
could  in  practice  easily  be  interpreted  in  a  discriminatory  way.  Article 
34  of  the  law  divided  active  military  service  into  two  categories,  "armed" 
and  "unarmed  service".  In  other  words,  while  some  drafted  men  would  be 
regarded  as  "normal"  soldiers  who  were  able  to  bear  arms,  others  would  be 
denied  arms  and  instead  employed  in  units  that  would  mostly  fulfill  manual 
work  behind  the  front  lines.  However,  while  this  division  might  seem  to  be 
a  standard  procedure  that  any  army  might  have,  the  Ottoman  conscription 
law  left  two  points  ambiguous:  first,  it  did  not  specify  exactly  who  would 
be  registered  in  the  armed  and  who  in  the  unarmed  category.  No  clear 
criteria  were  stated  in  this  regard.  The  law  was  much  more  specific  on  the 
procedures  concerning  medically  unfit  men  who  had  physical  problems  or 
illnesses  that  could  prevent  them  from  carrying  out  active  service  (articles 
34, 48).  But  no  such  clear  procedures  were  defined  for  the  unarmed  service 
category.  There  are  some  implications  in  explanatory  texts  about  the  law 

79  For  example,  see  Turk  Silahli  Kuvvetleri,  III,  part  6,  p.  232.  For  a  discussion  of  the  Ottoman 
conscription  practice  with  respect  to  its  relationship  with  the  principle  of  Ottomanism,  see 
Hacisalihoglu,  "Inclusion  and  Exclusion". 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


569 


that  the  division  might  have  essentially  been  based  on  physical  condition  of 
a  drafted  man,  such  as  having  a  minor  bodily  problem  which  would  prevent 
him  from  fulfilling  active  military  service  on  the  battlefield  but  did  not 
hinder  him  doing  manual  jobs.  There  are  also  some  implications  that  the 
assignment  to  unarmed  service  could  be  done  according  to  the  profession 
and  artisanal  skills  of  enlisted  men:  medical  personnel,  for  example,  could 
be  assigned  to  medical  corps,  and  the  literate  could  be  assigned  to  posts  as 
scribes  in  military  units.80  Secondly,  the  law  did  not  specify  precisely  what 
unarmed  service  would  involve.  In  practice,  it  became  synonymous  with 
hard  labor  and,  more  specifically,  with  the  labor  battalions. 

Forming  labor-based  military  units  was  not  an  entirely  new  phenomenon 
in  the  Ottoman  army.  There  were  similar  battalions  called  the  "Service 
Battalions"  which  had  been  formed  during  the  Balkan  Wars.81  Nor  was  it 
unique  to  the  Ottoman  army.  Since  the  work  of  war  required  vast  amounts 
of  labor,  all  combatant  nations  in  the  Great  War  constituted  labor  units 
to  support  their  war  effort.  And  in  many  cases,  such  labor  units  included 
recruits  who  were  deemed  to  be  "noncombatants",  a  category  which  was 
defined  by  political  authorities  in  a  discriminatory  way  based  on  race, 
ethnicity,  religion,  gender,  or  age.  Forms  of  recruitment  and  treatment  of 
these  laborers  not  only  varied  according  to  labor  demands,  but  also  were 
shaped  by  political  circumstances.82  To  give  but  a  few  examples,  a  large 
number  of  recruits  from  India  were  assigned  to  the  labor  and  porter  corps 
used  in  Iraq  by  the  British  Army  in  its  invasion  of  the  region  in  the  Great 
War.  These  labor  units,  which  were  pejoratively  called  "coolie"  corps,  also 
included  prisoners.83  Similar  labor  units  were  formed  in  Russia  for  non- 
Russian  draftees  such  as  the  Kirgiz.84 

Originally,  labor  units  in  the  Ottoman  army  were  manned  mainly  by 
men  too  old  or  too  young  to  serve  in  the  army,  by  wounded  or  injured 
soldiers  who  had  become  unfit  for  combatant  posts  on  the  battlefield, 
and  by  older  drafted  men  who  were  assigned  to  active  reserve  or  territo- 
rial reserve  units.85  But  during  the  Great  War  the  labor  battalions  were 
manned  overwhelmingly  by  the  non-Muslim  Ottoman  enlisted  men,  who 
were  regarded  as  "untrustworthy"  to  bear  arms,  regardless  of  their  age  or 

80  Behic,  Mukellefiyet-i  Askeriye  Kanun-i  Muvakkatinin  Izahi,  pp.  52, 188. 

81  Ozdemir,  "I.  Diinya  Savafi'nda  Amele  Taburlari",  p.  32. 

82  For  a  comparative  account  of  labor  battalions  in  the  Great  War,  see  Proctor,  Civilians  in  a 
World  at  War,  7974-797S,  pp.  40-75. 

83  See  Singha,  "Finding  Labor  from  India  for  the  War  in  Iraq". 

84  Sanborn,  Drafting  the  Russian  Nation,  p.  79. 

85  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  p.  341. 


570 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


physical  condition.  By  a  deliberate  decision  of  Ottoman  military  authorities, 
non-Muslim  drafted  men  were  mostly  assigned  to  the  "unarmed  service" 
category,  even  if  they  were  physically  fit  for  the  armed  service  category. 
In  an  order  of  the  War  Ministry  issued  on  3  August  1914,  it  was  explicitly 
stated  that  "the  labor  battalions  were  to  consist  as  much  as  possible  of 
non-Muslims".86  Those  who  were  registered  in  the  unarmed  category  were 
almost  entirely  employed  in  the  labor  battalions. 

In  this  sense,  the  labor  battalions  not  only  carried  out  useful  manual 
work,  but  they  also  acted  as  a  means  of  controlling  "suspect"  conscripts 
in  the  army.  These  suspect  elements  included  almost  all  non-Muslim 
subjects  during  the  Great  War,  who  were  seen  as  undependable  by  the 
CUP-dominated  state  authority,  which  believed  that  if  control  over  them 
was  loosened  even  a  little,  they  could  easily  turn  into  a  subversive  group 
supporting  the  enemy.  For  example,  after  the  defeat  in  Sarikamis  on  the 
Caucasus  front,  where  desertions  of  Armenian  soldiers  to  the  Russian  side 
caused  anger  among  Ottoman  authorities  who  then  also  claimed  that  that 
the  local  Armenians  were  in  collaboration  with  the  Russians,  the  acting 
commander-in-chief  Enver  Pasha  issued  an  order  to  all  military  units  on 
25  February  1915,  instructing  that  "Armenians  shall  strictly  not  be  employed 
in  mobile  armies,  in  mobile  and  stationary  gendarmeries,  or  in  any  armed 
service."*7 

However,  it  should  also  be  noted  that,  as  in  the  case  of  many  orders  given 
by  Ottoman  authorities  during  the  war,  the  application  of  this  order  was 
not  always  so  strict  and  standardized.  Not  only  after  this  order,  but  also 
after  the  Armenian  population  was  deported  from  Anatolia  and  exposed 
to  ethnic  cleansing,  there  were  still  some  Armenian  soldiers  serving  under 
arms  in  various  places.  For  example,  there  were  Armenian  soldiers  in  the 
Ottoman  army  fighting  with  arms  on  the  Sinai-Palestine  front  as  late  as 
spring  1916. 88  In  fact,  it  can  be  argued  that,  whereas  the  existence  of  such 
men  implies  the  limits  of  the  Ottoman  power  in  executing  its  decisions, 
such  exceptions  might  actually  also  be  desired  by  the  same  power  since  it 
was  congruent  with  Ottoman  pragmatism  during  the  war.  If  some  elements 
of  an  ethnic-religious  group  could  provide  useful  labor  for  the  Ottoman 
mobilization  effort  in  the  way  defined  by  the  Ottoman  state,  Ottoman 
authorities  did  not  hesitate  to  utilize  it  even  when  they  expressed  open 
aggression  toward  that  group  in  general.  For  example,  since  the  Ottoman 

86  Ozdemir,  "I.  Diinya  Savasi'nda  Amele  Taburlan",  p.  31. 

87  Giiriin,  The  Armenian  File,  p.  206. 

88  Ziircher,  "Ottoman  Labour  Battalions  in  World  War  I",  p.  192. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


571 


army  suffered  from  insufficient  medical  personnel,  non-Muslim  military 
doctors  were  not  assigned  to  the  labor  battalions;  they  were  always  kept  in 
regular  combat  units.89  While  their  personnel  were  overwhelmingly  non- 
Muslim,  many  labor  battalions  themselves  did  not  have  military  doctors.90 

In  the  case  of  non-Muslims,  control  by  conscription  or,  more  specifically, 
control  by  employment  in  unarmed  labor  was  a  premeditated  practice  in 
the  Ottoman  system,  as  shown  by  the  official  correspondence  between 
Ottoman  authorities.  More  direct  references  to  this  method  can  be  found 
in  the  later  phases  of  the  war,  and  especially  during  the  early  phase  of  the 
Turkish  National  Struggle  (1919-1922).  For  instance,  this  was  adopted  in  order 
to  neutralize  the  Greek  population  in  the  central  and  eastern  Black  Sea 
region,  who  were  regarded  as  a  potential  fifth  column.  By  conscripting  the 
most  physically  able  elements  of  their  male  population,  Turkish  authorities 
also  aimed  to  eradicate  any  potential  resistance  to  the  occasional  deporta- 
tion of  Greek  villagers.91 

While  the  majority  of  the  enlisted  men  in  the  labor  battalions  consisted  of 
Ottoman  Greeks  and  Armenians,  there  were  also  non-Muslims  from  smaller 
communities,  such  as  the  Assyrians  (Siiryani).  Nor  did  the  labor  battalions 
include  only  non-Muslims:  Muslim  conscripts  were  also  employed  in  them. 
But  these  Muslim  enlisted  men  were  usually  the  ones  who  were  too  old  or 
regarded  as  not  entirely  fit  physically  or  useful  for  armed  service.  The  labor 
battalions  also  included  Muslims  released  from  prisons  to  contribute  to  the 
mobilization  effort.92  Sometimes  labor  units  were  manned  by  convicts  as  a 
form  of  alternative  punishment,  in  which  way  their  labor  would  be  more 
useful  than  locking  them  away.  For  example,  in  the  Third  Army  zone  of 
the  Caucasus  Front  in  1915,  about  3,000  captured  draft-evaders  and  desert- 
ers were  ordered  by  the  army  command  to  be  sent  to  the  provinces  of 
Diyarbekir  and  Mamuretiilaziz  to  work  in  agriculture  and  transportation.93 

Another  common  way  of  compensating  for  the  depletion  of  the  agricul- 
tural workforce  by  using  "outcasts"  during  the  war  was  to  assign  captured 
prisoners-of-war  to  large  farms  urgently  in  need  of  manpower,  a  method 
that  was  used  especially  in  the  major  provinces  of  Istanbul,  Hiidavendigar/ 
Bursa,  and  Edirne,  and  in  the  districts  surrounding  these  urban  centers, 

89  Mutlu,  Birinci Dunya  Sava§i'nda  Amele  Taburlan,  p.  159. 

90  Ozdemir,  "I.  Dunya  Savaf  l'nda  Amele  Taburlan",  pp.  120-121, 132, 135. 

91  Balcioglu, Belgelerle Milli Miicadele  SirasmdaAnadolu'daAyaklanmalarveMerkez  Ordusu, 
PP-  79.  83,  87, 190. 

92  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,p.  341. 

93  Ogiin,  Kafkas  Cephesi'nin  I.  Dunya  Sava^i'ndaki Lojistik  Destegi,  p.  89. 


572 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


such  as  izmit  and  Catalca.94  It  is  understood  from  documents  that  many 
Russian  prisoners-of-war  were  mostly  employed  in  agricultural  work  this 
way.95  Upon  the  request  of  landowners,  various  numbers  of  POWs  were 
assigned  to  the  farms  on  condition  that  the  landowner  would  house,  feed, 
and  guard  them.  Landowners  were  also  required  to  report  every  week  to 
their  local  administration  and  the  military  supply  station  inspectorate 
(menzil  miifetti§ligi)  about  the  situation  of  the  POWs  assigned  to  them.  In 
the  case  of  desertions,  urgent  reporting  was  required  together  with  physical 
descriptions  of  the  POWs.96 

Terms  of  service  in  the  labor  battalions  were  not  limited  during  the  war, 
but  drafted  men  were  generally  kept  in  the  labor  battalions  for  a  minimum 
of  three  years.97  The  main  tasks  fulfilled  by  the  labor  battalions  during  the 
war  consisted  of  working  in  the  construction  and  maintenance  of  roads 
and  railroads,  in  the  construction  of  fortified  posts,  helping  transport  men 
and  materiel  to  the  fronts,  and  helping  in  agriculture.98  Separate  labor  bat- 
talions were  organized  in  each  army  district  of  the  empire.  But  they  were 
not  static  units  and  they  could  be  transferred  to  any  region  of  the  empire 
whenever  they  were  needed.99  There  were  ninety  labor  battalions  at  the  time 
of  mobilization  was  declared  and  each  battalion  was  planned  to  include 
around  1,200  men.  In  total,  there  were  approximately  100,000  men  employed 
in  them  in  1914. 100  There  are  no  precise  data  available  about  the  total  number 
of  men  employed  in  the  labor  battalions  during  the  four  years  of  the  war, 
but  it  can  be  estimated  that  the  total  number  exceeded  100,000,  taking  into 
account  the  fact  that  the  War  Ministry  decided  to  form  fifty  more  labor 
battalions  in  1915. 101 

94  BOA,  DH.EUM.5.§B.,  34/25, 12  March  1917;  Toprak,  ktihad- Terakkive  CihanHarbi,  227  n.  14. 

95  BOA,  DH.EUM.5.!}  B.,  37/21, 17  May  1917.  Another  interesting  application  in  this  respect  was 
that  Muslim  prisoners  of  war  in  the  hands  of  the  Germans  were  transferred  to  the  Ottoman 
Empire  to  be  employed  in  agriculture  and  factories,  where  a  labor  force  was  needed.  See  ATASE, 
BDH,  1835/30/1-37- 

96  BOA,  DH.EUM.5.!}  B.,  31/36,  i2june  1917.  It  is  also  important  here  to  note  that  regular  Ottoman 
troops  could  also  be  employed  in  agricultural  work  in  times  of  urgent  need,  if  there  was  no 
combat  on  the  battlefield.  For  example,  an  order  issued  from  the  War  Ministry  in  November 
1916  required  that,  where  and  when  possible,  regular  troops  should  perform  agricultural  work 
in  their  zones.  See  Ogiin,  Kafkas  Cephesinin  I.  Dunya  Sava§i'ndaki Lojistik  Destegi,  p.  93.  For  a 
similar  practice,  also  see  BOA,  DH.§FR.,  76/134, 16  May  1917. 

97  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  p.  342. 

98  Ozdemir,  "I.  Dunya  Savafi'nda  Amele  Taburlari",  p.  32. 

99  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  p.  345;  Ozdemir,  "I.  Dunya  Savafi'nda  Amele 
Taburlari",  p.  31. 

100  Ozdemir,  "I.  Diinya  Savafi'nda  Amele  Taburlari",  pp.  21-22, 33. 

101  Ibid.,  p.  63. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


573 


The  labor  battalions  in  the  Ottoman  army  were  characterized  by  notori- 
ously poor  living  and  working  conditions.  Some  of  the  major  problems 
which  the  labor  battalions  suffered  from  throughout  the  war  were  poor 
accommodation  and  lack  of  supplies  and  equipment.  Eyewitness  accounts 
confirm  that  many  soldiers  in  the  labor  battalions  were  underfed  and  suf- 
fered from  disease.102  Moreover,  the  treatment  of  soldier-laborers  in  the  labor 
battalions  was  generally  bad.  Conditions  in  the  labor  battalions  became 
particularly  atrocious  for  the  Armenian  enlisted  men  especially  after  the 
deportation  of  the  civilian  Armenian  population  began  in  1915. 103  Such 
notorious  aspects  of  the  labor  battalions,  which  became  known  from  the 
experiences  of  early  draftees  and  were  spread  among  communities  verbally 
from  person  to  person,104  intimidated  potential  draftees  and  created  an  extra 
motive  among  reluctant  non-Muslims  to  evade  military  service.105  Because 
of  such  problems,  desertions  from  the  labor  battalions  were  frequent106  and, 
although  non-Muslims  constituted  the  majority,  Turkish  soldiers-laborers 
also  deserted.107 

Resistance  to  conscription:  the  problem  of  desertion 

Ottoman  conscription  was  unpopular  among  the  masses  it  targeted,  and 
occasional  resistance  to  getting  conscripted,  in  the  form  of  draft-evasion 
and  desertion,  had  accompanied  the  system  in  times  of  both  peace  and 
war.  However,  in  terms  of  its  considerable  extent  and  intensity,  resistance 
in  the  form  of  desertion  (firari,  the  Ottoman-Turkish  term  for  deserter, 
actually  covers  both  deserters  and  draft-evaders)  during  the  Great  War 

102  For  example,  Rafael  de  Nogales  states  in  his  memoirs  that,  while  he  was  in  Adana  in  1915,  he 
observed  that  some  Armenian  and  Greek  soldiers  in  four  labor  battalions  in  the  region,  working 
in  road  construction,  suffered  severely  from  and  died  of  famine:  de  Nogales,  Four  Years  beneath 
the  Crescent,  pp.  176-177. 

103  After  this  date,  the  number  of  armed  guards  in  the  battalions  was  increased  and  control 
over  the  Armenian  soldiers  became  stricter.  For  an  example  on  such  measures,  see  Askeri 
Tarih  BelgeleriDergisi,  81  (December  1982),  document  no.  1837,  p.  181.  Eyewitness  accounts  also 
recorded  direct  assaults  on  the  Armenians  in  the  labor  battalions  in  eastern  Anatolia,  and  some 
have  claimed  these  even  included  massacres.  See,  for  example,  Kiinzler,  In  the  Land  of  Blood  and 
Tears,  pp.  16-20. 

104  Sotiriou,  Farewell  to  Anatolia,  pp.  70-71. 

105  For  example,  this  point  is  wittily  explained  in  the  memoirs  of  an  Ottoman  Greek.  See 
Spataris,  "Biz  Istanbullular Bbyleyiz":  Fener'den  Amlar,  p.  147. 

106  BOA,  DH.EUM.6.§B.,  44/32,  20  June  1915;  BOA,  DH.EUM.KLU.,  6/39, 10  January  1915. 

107  Ozdemir,  "I.  Diinya  Savasi'nda  Amele  Taburlari",  p.  96. 


574 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


presents  a  unique  case.  The  problem  of  desertion  was  a  major  factor  that 
eroded  Ottoman  war  performance.  The  total  numbers  in  the  official  Ot- 
toman casualty  statistics  do  not  provide  a  separate  figure  for  desertions, 
but  include  it  under  the  more  general  heading  of  "deserters,  POWs,  sick, 
missing",  which  reached  the  total  of  1,565,000. 108  According  to  the  accounts 
of  various  high-ranking  military  authorities  who  served  during  the  Great 
War,  the  proportion  of  desertion  in  this  figure  was  estimated  to  be  as  high 
as  500, 000. 109  Various  secondary  sources  also  confirm  this  estimate.110  This 
represents  nearly  17  per  cent  of  all  the  men  mobilized  (3,000,000)  during  the 
war.  The  same  percentage  was  about  1  per  cent  in  Germany111  and  slightly 
higher  than  1  per  cent  in  the  British  armed  forces.112 

Nearly  every  ethnic  or  religious  group  in  the  empire  is  represented  in 
this  picture.  As  mentioned  earlier,  desertions  of  Armenian  soldiers  were  not 
infrequent  and  such  desertions  in  the  early  phase  of  the  war113  led  Ottoman 
authorities  to  employ  them  in  the  labor  battalions.  Ottoman  Greeks  even 
coined  a  specific  term  for  their  deserters,  "the  attic  battalions",  to  describe 
those  who  hid  in  the  attics  of  their  buildings  to  avoid  Ottoman  recruit- 
ment authorities.114  Ottoman  Jews  were  not  particularly  enthusiastic  about 
military  service,  either.  Among  various  methods  to  avoid  service,  obtaining 
a  false  medical  report  declaring  an  individual  unfit  for  military  service 
was  apparently  quite  popular  among  this  group.115  Similarly,  desertions  of 
Arab  soldiers  were  also  frequent,  especially  in  the  second  half  of  the  war."6 
However,  most  desertions  were  attempted  by  Anatolian  Muslims  (namely, 
Turks  as  majority,  Kurds,  and  to  a  lesser  extent  Circassian  and  Laz  elements) 

108  ATASE,  BDH,  62/309A/005;  Larcher,  La  guerre  turque  dans  la  guerre  mondiale,  p.  602. 

109  See,  for  example,  Liman  von  Sanders,  Five  Years  in  Turkey,  p.  190;  Inonii,  Hatiralar,  I,  2nd 
edn,  pp.  126-127. 

110  See,  for  example,  Yalman,  Turkey  in  the  World  War,  pp.  261-262;  Erickson,  Ordered  to  Die, 
p.  243- 

111  Ziircher,  "Between  Death  and  Desertion",  p.  257.  It  has  to  be  mentioned  here  that  desertion  in 
the  German  army  proportionally  increased  in  the  last  year  of  the  war,  and  it  was  remarkably  high 
in  certain  units  on  certain  fronts.  For  example,  the  spring  offensive  of  1918  brought  the  German 
soldier  to  the  limits  of  his  endurance:  "Up  to  10  per  cent  of  men  deserted  in  the  preparatory 
stages  en  route  from  the  eastern  front."  See  Englander,  "Mutinies  and  Military  Morale",  p.  198. 

112  Statistics  of  the  Military  Effort  of  the  British  Empire  during  the  Great  War,  p.  741. 

113  Shaw,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  I,  pp.  93-105. 

114  Spataris,  "Biz Istanbullular Boyleyiz": Fener'den  Anilar,  p.  148. 

115  Aaronsohn,  Turk  OrdusuylaFilistin'de,  45.  Feigning  illness  and  malingering  were  also  com- 
mon among  Muslim  enlisted  men.  See,  for  example,  BirDoktorun  Harp  ve  Memleket,  pp.  72-73. 

116  See,  for  example,  BOA,  DH.EUM.KLH.,  5/56,  22  December  1915.  The  issue  of  frequent  Arab 
desertions  is  also  commonly  mentioned  in  the  memoirs  of  German  officers  who  served  in  the 
Ottoman  Empire.  See,  for  example,  Guhr,  Anadolu'danFilistin'e  Turklerle  Omuz  Omuza,  pp.  144, 211. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


575 


who  constituted  not  only  the  majority  of  the  Ottoman  population,  but  also 
the  bulk  of  the  enlisted  men  in  the  Ottoman  army"7 

Neither  the  presumed  strong  Ottoman-Turkish  military  culture  con- 
demning desertion  nor  severe  penal  laws  or  references  to  the  Islamic 
injunctions  against  avoiding  military  service  could  prevent  desertion  from 
becoming  a  major  problem.  The  reasons  for  desertion  varied.  The  most 
common,  mentioned  in  the  interrogation  reports  of  deserters  captured 
by  Ottoman  authorities,  as  well  as  of  those  captured  by  the  British  in  Iraq 
and  Palestine,  include  physical  and  mental  exhaustion  stemming  from 
dire  conditions  at  the  front,  despair  and  frustration  resulting  from  the 
prolongation  of  the  war,  abuse  at  the  hands  of  officers,  the  impossibility  of 
obtaining  home  leaves,  and  reactions  to  the  almost  unlimited  extension 
of  term  of  service.118  Although  almost  all  captured  deserters  express  regret 
about  their  actions,  they  also  implicitly  or  explicitly  explain  that  they  left 
as  a  last  resort,  when  the  conditions  became  unbearable  and  intolerable. 
This  suggests  that,  although  conscription  was  an  obligatory  form  of  military 
service,  the  enlisted  men  could  still  see  a  "tacit"  contractual  aspect  in  it. 
Although  an  individual  potential  draftee  was  legally  obliged  to  enlist,  this 
obligation  was  accepted  as  long  as  certain  of  the  draftee's  basic  expectations 
(provision  of  basic  daily  needs,  fair  treatment,  reasonable  term  of  service, 
continuation  of  one's  belief  in  the  legitimacy  of  the  service,  providing  for 
his  family  while  he  is  away,  etc.)  were  met  by  the  authorities. 

There  were  of  course  thousands  of  deserters  who  could  not  be  caught 
immediately.  Many  of  them  turned  into  brigands  to  survive,  forming  armed 
bands,  the  size  of  which  ranged  from  about  a  dozen  to  a  few  hundred  people. 
Such  armed  bands,  which  were  usually  formed  on  the  basis  of  common 
ethnic  and  religious  ties,  presented  a  major  security  threat  across  Anatolia. 
The  trouble  they  caused  reached  an  intolerable  level  in  the  later  phase  of 
the  war.  A  telegram  sent  by  the  Interior  Minister  Talat  Pasha  to  all  local 
administrative  units  on  1  June  1918  complained  that  murders  committed 
by  bands  of  deserter-brigands  were  occurring  in  almost  every  corner  of  the 

117  For  instance,  according  to  a  report  on  deserters  in  the  province  of  Aydin,  covering  the  period 
from  the  beginning  of  mobilization  (2  August  1914)  to  June  1916,  shows  that  Muslims  constituted 
the  majority  of  deserters  (28,950  out  of  a  total  of  49,228):  BOA,  DH.EUM.6.S,  B.,  9/8, 6  September 
1916.  The  province  of  Aydin  included  at  this  time  the  subprovinces  of  Izmir  (the  centre  of  the 
province),  Aydin,  Denizli,  and  Saruhan  (Manisa). 

118  For  various  examples  of  such  reports,  see  ATASE,  BDH,  2322/71/1-1;  ATASE,  BDH,  2322/71/1-7. 
For  some  examples  from  British  intelligence,  see  the  National  Archives  of  the  UK,  Kew  [hence- 
forth, TNA]:PRO  WO  157/703,  March-April  1916;  TNA:PRO  WO  157/800,  June  1917;  TNA:PRO  WO 
157-727,  May  1918. 


576 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


country.119  Next  to  murder,  the  more  routine  crimes  included  the  pillaging 
and  robbing  of  villagers  and  townsmen.120  This  turned  desertion  into  a 
much  larger  issue  of  public  security,  which  required  the  state  to  reorganize 
its  gendarmerie  to  cope  with  the  problem.  On  the  other  hand,  there  are 
examples  showing  that  roaming  deserters  in  the  Ottoman  countryside 
were  not  treated  as  complete  outcasts  by  local  populations;  on  the  contrary, 
quite  a  few  of  them  could  easily  hide  in  the  vicinity  of  their  own  villages 
and  were  provided  with  shelter  and  food.121  Ottoman  military  authorities 
often  note  the  support  of  the  local  populations  and  also  lament  the  fact 
that  this  encouraged  further  desertions.122 

In  fact,  it  is  even  difficult  to  argue  that  deserters  were  treated  as  complete 
outcasts  by  the  state,  either.  When  the  need  for  military  labor  was  so  pressing 
and  the  number  of  deserters  was  so  high,  Ottoman  authorities  were  always 
looking  for  a  way  to  restore  deserters  into  service  during  the  Great  War. 
Although  military  law  required  the  death  penalty  for  deserters,  authorities 
typically  reserved  it  for  repeat  offenders  and  those  who  committed  serious 
crimes  during  their  absence.  Milder  forms  of  punishment  such  as  beating 
or  imprisonment  were  usually  applied  to  those  who  were  caught  during 
or  after  their  first  attempt.123  More  importantly,  three  general  amnesties 
were  issued  for  all  deserters  on  behalf  of  the  sultan.  The  first  one  of  these 
came  as  early  as  the  declaration  of  mobilization  (6  August  1914),  the  second 
appeared  on  28  June  1915,  and  the  third  was  announced  in  the  last  year  of  the 
war  (15  July  1918).124  These  promised  pardons  for  deserters  who  surrendered 
to  the  authorities  within  a  specified  time  period.  The  objective  of  all  three 
amnesties  was  basically  to  bring  the  deserted  military  labor  back  in  service, 
which  would  also  help  decrease  the  security  problem  in  the  countryside. 
There  were  other  measures  designed  to  recover  the  deserted  labor,  which 
were  implemented  in  the  absence  of  an  amnesty.  For  example,  the  Interior 
Ministry  circulated  an  announcement  to  all  local  administrative  units  on 

119  BOA,  DH.SFR.,  88/3,  ljune  1918. 

120  BOA,  DH.§FR.,  79/17,  2  August  1917. 

121  Ziircher  says  that  the  fact  that  local  people  often  sympathized  with  deserters  is  one  of 
main  aspects  that  differentiate  the  Ottoman  case  from  West  European  countries.  See  Ziircher, 
"Refusing  to  Serve  by  Other  Means",  p.  50. 

122  See,  for  example,  ATASE,  BDH,  2880/323/3,  Report  sent  from  the  commander  of  the  37th 
Caucasus  Division  to  the  II  Caucasus  Corps  on  20  June  1917. 

123  This  was  also  observed  by  the  Dutch  embassy  as  early  as  May  1916,  which  reported  that 
"the  army  has  replaced  prison  sentences  with  corporal  punishment  in  the  field  in  order  not  to 
deplete  the  strength  of  the  army  further".  See  Ziircher,  "Little  Mehmet  in  the  Desert",  p.  234. 

124  For  the  texts  of  these  amnesties  respectively,  see  Diistur,  series  II,  vol.  6,  p.  981;  vol.  7,  p.  630; 
vol.  10,  p.  553. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


577 


21  September  1918,  stating  that  deserters  surrendering  of  their  own  free 
will  could  be  enlisted  as  gendarmes  if  they  met  the  necessary  criteria  for 
eligibility.125  Such  surrendered  deserters  were  usually  employed  in  pursuit 
squads  formed  by  the  Ottoman  gendarmerie  to  capture  deserters  and  fight 
armed  bands  in  the  Anatolian  provinces. 

Such  measures  were  not  entirely  ineffective,  but  Ottoman  authorities 
continued  to  struggle  with  the  problem  of  desertion  until  the  end  of  the 
war.  It  remained  a  major  factor  eroding  Ottoman  performance  on  the  bat- 
tlefield and  challenged  state  authority  on  the  home  front.  According  to  the 
official  Ottoman  statistics,  the  number  of  enlisted  men  under  arms  was 
560,000  when  the  Armistice  of  Mudros  was  signed  on  30  October  1918.126  As 
mentioned  above,  the  total  number  of  desertions  had  reached  almost  the 
same  level  by  that  time. 

Conclusions  for  a  comparative  analysis 

Obligatory  military  service  became  increasingly  more  compelling  as  a 
method  of  securing  military  labor  in  the  age  of  modern  warfare,  from  the 
late  eighteenth  century  onwards,  and  the  Ottoman  case  is  no  exception.  As  a 
total  war  that  demanded  a  permanent  and  large-scale  mobilization  of  man- 
power, the  Great  War  was  the  apogee  of  this  process  and  made  obligatory 
military  service  a  necessity  for  all  the  belligerents.  Conscription,  however, 
was  never  purely  a  military  matter,  but  was  also  significantly  related  to 
political  concerns  and  internal  security.  Since  its  first  phase  of  application 
in  the  era  of  Mahmud  II,  the  system  of  conscription  was  in  congruence  with 
the  state's  centralizing  policies.  Conscription  with  a  working  infrastructure 
would  give  the  central  state  an  increased  ability  to  control  the  men  at  the 
local  level  and  would  help  it  counteract  the  power  of  local  notables  in  the 
provinces.  In  this  sense,  from  the  state's  perspective  the  coming  of  conscrip- 
tion was  important  also  in  terms  of  internal  security.  The  evolution  of  the 
system  was  far  from  smooth,  mainly  due  to  the  infrastructural  weakness 
of  the  state,  but  the  political  logic  behind  conscription  remained  relevant 
throughout  the  Great  War. 

The  ideological  preferences  of  the  Ottoman  state  also  played  a  determin- 
ing role  in  shaping  the  nature  of  conscription.  The  religious  and  ethnic 
hierarchy  of  the  Ottoman  polity  was  reflected  in  it.  Not  only  in  its  human 

125  BOA,  DH.UMVM.,  124/182, 21  September  1918. 

126  ATASE,  BDH,  62/309A/005. 


578 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


composition,  but  also  in  its  symbolism  and  ideological  justification,  the 
system  was  predominantly  a  Muslim  institution.  Conscription  was  hardly 
universal  in  the  Ottoman  context.  But  this  did  not  mean  a  complete  exclu- 
sion of  Ottoman  non-Muslims.  Instead,  their  situation  was  characterized 
by  a  discriminatory  inclusion  within  a  pragmatic  outlook.  For  a  long  time, 
non-Muslims  were  loosely  included  in  the  system:  they  were  denied  ac- 
tive service,  but  were  obliged  to  pay  an  exemption  fee  instead.  The  new 
regulations  after  1909  and  then  in  1914  made  Ottoman  conscription  more 
comprehensive,  but  still  in  a  pragmatic  fashion.  When  the  demand  for  mili- 
tary labor  was  very  high  during  the  Great  War,  more  and  more  non-Muslims 
were  enlisted  into  the  armed  forces.  But  the  overwhelming  majority  of  the 
enlisted  non-Muslims  were  employed  in  the  unarmed  labor  battalions. 
Employing  them  in  this  way  not  only  supplied  useful  labor  for  manual  work, 
but  also  provided  a  means  of  control  which  would  keep  physically  able 
non-Muslim  male  populations  submissive,  at  a  time  when  the  nationalist 
CUP  government  increasingly  considered  them  as  a  potential  fifth  column. 
In  this  respect,  conscription  as  a  "nation-building"  project  failed  in  the 
Ottoman  case.  One  may  even  speculate  that  it  accelerated  the  dissolution  of 
the  imperial  demographic  composition.  On  the  other  hand,  it  can  be  argued 
that  Ottoman  conscription  served  as  a  precursor  for,  a  sort  of  catalyst  of,  the 
Turkish-Muslim  identity  that  became  the  main  basis  of  Turkish  nationalism. 

Ottoman  conscription  was  a  form  of  tributary  and  noncommodified 
labor,  in  which  eligible  males  had  to  serve  from  legal  obligation.  There 
would  be  no  payment  in  return  for  this  service,  the  duration  of  which  was 
supposed  to  be  limited  by  law.  However,  wartime  conditions  could  alter 
this  limit.  While  the  duration  of  active  military  service  was  declared  to  be 
two  years  for  the  army  in  May  1914,127  it  was  continuously  extended  as  the 
war  prolonged.  Consequently,  enlisted  men  had  to  serve  until  the  end  of 
the  war.  It  can  be  said  that  this  extension  pushed  conscript  labor  toward 
the  unfree  end  on  the  axis  of  free/unfree  labor. 


127  According  to  the  Law  on  Military  Service  of  1914,  the  total  duration  of  service  had  three 
parts:  beginning  with  the  date  of  enlistment,  the  first  two  years  were  for  active  army  service 
(nizam);  then  sixteen  years  for  active  reserve  service  (ihtiyat);  and,  finally,  seven  more  years 
in  the  territorial  reserve  service  (mustahfiz).  The  total  period  of  service  was  twenty-five  years. 
However,  the  two  years  of  active  service  was  actually  only  for  the  infantry;  it  varied  for  the 
gendarmerie  and  the  navy :  it  was  three  years  for  the  former  and  five  for  the  latter.  On  the  other 
hand,  according  to  the  Article  6  of  the  law,  active  army  service  in  all  military  classes  could  be 
extended  in  wartime,  which  did  actually  happen  during  the  Great  War.  See  "Miikellefiyet-i 
Askeriye  Kanun-i  Muvakkati",  29  Nisan  1330/12  May  1914,  Dustur,  series  II,  vol.  6,  pp.  662-704. 


MOBILIZING  MILITARY  LABOR  IN  THE  AGE  OF  TOTAL  WAR 


579 


As  had  been  the  case  in  European  conscription  systems  after  the  French 
Revolution,  obligatory  military  service  was  presented  to  the  public  as  a 
form  of  taxation  incumbent  upon  all  citizens  as  a  requirement  for  citizen- 
ship. In  the  Ottoman  case  religious  justification  played  an  important  role 
as  well.  The  discourse  of  obligatory  military  service  as  a  patriotic  duty 
was  amalgamated  with  a  religious  discourse  referring  to  the  Islamic  legal 
concept  of  Holy  War.128  This  religious  discourse  culminated  in  a  "binding" 
document  for  Muslims  when  the  Ottoman  state  officially  proclaimed  Holy 
War  (cihad).  A  religious  decree,  issued  through  the  office  of  the  Sheikh 
al-Islam  on  11  November  1914,  invited  all  Ottoman  Muslims  to  fight  as  a 
religious  duty,  as  well  as  demanding  support  from  Muslims  all  over  the 
world.  The  emphasis  on  masculinity,  which  equated  military  service  to 
a  "rite  of  passage"  into  manhood,  was  another  mechanism  for  justifying 
conscription,  with  deep  roots  in  Ottoman-Turkish  popular  culture.129 

Ottoman  conscription  practice  also  shows  that,  even  when  conscription 
is  the  most  dominant  form  of  military  labor,  existing  social-economic- 
political  conditions  and  the  multiple  necessities  of  warfare  require  the 
simultaneous  existence  of  different  forms  of  recruitment.  In  the  Ottoman 
case,  conscription  was  never  total,  because  of  the  infrastructural  weak- 
nesses of  the  Ottoman  state,  and  the  extent  of  manpower  needs  for  specific 
purposes.  The  pragmatic  needs  of  the  state  and  the  specific  requirements 
of  war  simultaneously  produced  hybrid  forms  of  recruitment  (old  and  new). 
As  discussed  above,  besides  conscript  labor,  the  Ottoman  army  developed 
and  utilized  various  hybrid  forms  under  the  general  heading  of  "volunteers". 
Different  from  conscript  labor,  volunteers  represented  a  certain  degree  of 
commodification,  as  many  of  them  received  payment  or  obtained  material 
benefits  in  return  for  their  service.  However,  they  were  still  subject  to  the 
conscription  regulations  and  had  to  serve  until  the  end  of  the  war  once 
theyjoined  the  colors.  Even  mainstream  Ottoman  conscription  included  a 
different  level  of  commodification,  as  it  allowed  (and  sometimes  in  practice 
obliged,  as  in  the  case  of  non-Muslims)  the  avoidance  of  service  through  the 
payment  of  an  exemption  fee.  The  labor  battalions  can  also  be  mentioned  in 
this  respect.  These  constituted  a  separate  subcategory  within  conscription, 
through  which  conscript  labor  was  used  in  manual  works  primarily  related 

128  Heinzelmann,  Cihaddan  Vatan  Savunmasma,  p.  264. 

129  This  emphasis  on  manhood  was  frequently  used  in  the  Ottoman  propaganda  literature 
during  the  war.  In  such  literature,  usually  in  the  form  of  short  and  simple  stories,  the  mothers 
and  other  female  loved  ones  of  potential  draftees  were  always  depicted  as  encouraging  their 
boys  to  join  the  war  to  protect  their  virtue  (namus)  against  the  infidel  enemy.  For  an  example, 
see  Seyfi,  "Oglumu  Hududa  Gonderdikten  Sonra",  pp.  103-104. 


580 


MEHMET  BEJiKCi 


to  military  need,  but  also  in  other  economic  sectors  such  as  agriculture.  It 
can  be  said  that  enlisted  men  in  the  labor  battalions  were  employed  "forced 
war  workers"  within  a  military  framework. 

The  coexistence  of  different  types  of  military  labor  was  certainly  not 
unique  to  the  Ottoman  case.  In  his  seminal  article  on  the  evolution  of 
recruitment  types  in  the  modern  west,  John  Lynn  has  already  pointed  to 
the  continuity  of  "old"  forms  and  the  possibility  of  coexistence  of  different 
types.130 

In  this  sense,  the  Ottoman  practice  of  conscription  confirms  that  types 
of  military  labor  were  rarely  entirely  exclusive.  Various  factors  such  as 
the  pragmatic  needs  of  warfare,  infrastructural  problems,  and  political 
preferences  mitigated  exclusive  categories  and  required  a  more  hybrid 
system.  Rather  than  following  a  teleological  line  of  transition,  it  is  more 
reasonable  to  argue  that  a  particular  type  became  dominant  at  a  specific 
time  and  place,  still  allowing  room  for  other  types,  as  in  the  case  of  the 
Ottoman  Great  War  experience. 

Finally,  the  problem  of  desertion,  which  reached  its  peak  during  the  Great 
War,  demonstrates  that  resistance  to  compulsory  military  service  was  an 
integral  part  of  the  history  of  Ottoman  conscription.  The  recruitment  of 
military  labor  in  a  tributary  form  did  not  guarantee  absolute  control  over  it. 
Despite  the  existence  of  legal  obligation,  the  threat  of  severe  punishment, 
peer  pressure,  and  religious-nationalist-cultural  discourses  that  praised 
military  service,  the  Ottoman  case  reveals  that  there  was  always  a  limit  to 
obedience  to  conscription.  The  Great  War  was  a  time  for  the  Ottoman  state 
to  use  its  actual  and  discursive  power  to  mobilize  the  maximum  amount 
of  manpower  but,  ironically,  it  was  also  a  period  in  which  the  evasion  of 
military  service  reached  very  high  levels.  The  extent  of  the  problem  al- 
lows us  to  argue  that  enlisted  men  were  not  entirely  passive;  they  had  an 
agency  through  which  they  could  react  to  that  obligation  -  at  least  when 
basic  expectations,  which  had  been  implicitly  or  explicitly  promised  by  the 
conscription  law  at  the  beginning,  were  not  met  by  the  state.  This  reaction, 
which  forced  the  state  to  take  measures  both  within  the  military  and  on  the 
home  front,  was  a  major  variable  that  played  an  important  role  in  reshaping 
the  way  conscription  was  executed. 


130  Lynn,  "The  Evolution  of  Army  Style  in  Modern  West". 


Soldiering  as  work 


The  all-volunteer  force  in  the  United  States 
Beth  Bailey 

On  30  June  1973  Dwight  Elliot  Stone,  the  last  man  to  be  conscripted  into 
the  US  military,  reported  for  basic  training.  The  following  day  the  United 
States  began  its  experiment  with  an  all-volunteer  force.1 

Most  Americans  understood  this  move  as  a  major  and  unprecedented 
transformation  -  even  as  a  radical  experiment  -  even  though  the  longstand- 
ing draft  was,  in  fact,  the  aberration.  Until  Cold  War  pressures  convinced 
Americans  that  a  large  standing  army  was  justified,  the  nation  had  relied  on 
a  volunteer  force,  turning  to  conscription  only  in  time  of  war.  But  memories 
were  short.  Even  though  the  draft  had  been  in  effect  for  only  thirty-three 
years,  from  1940  through  slightly  more  than  three  decades  of  war  and  tense 
peace,  conscription  had  come  to  seem  normal,  an  expected  part  of  young 
men's  lives. 

Short  memories  aside,  however,  those  who  saw  the  all-volunteer  force 
(AVF)  as  a  radical  experiment  had  a  point.  It  was  clear  in  1973  that  the  nation 
would  need  to  recruit  20,000  to  30,000  nonprior  service  (NPS)  accessions  a 
month  -  vastly  more  than  in  the  all-volunteer  past.  And  they  would  have 
to  do  so  from  a  population  of  youth  that  could  generously  be  characterized 
as  antimilitary,  persuading  them  to  join  a  troubled  institution  at  the  end 
of  a  difficult  and  unpopular  war.  The  chair  of  the  House  Armed  Services 
Committee  was  widely  quoted  as  he  quipped  -  repeatedly  -  that  the  only 
way  the  United  States  could  get  a  volunteer  force  was  to  draft  one.2 

The  American  move  from  one  military  form  to  another  was  not  messy 
and  gradual,  as  are  many  of  the  transitions  discussed  in  this  volume. 
Instead  it  was  clear  and  absolute,  from  one  day  to  the  next,  and  both  the 
end  of  conscription  and  the  structure  of  the  new  system  were  argued  over, 
legislated,  planned,  observed,  analyzed,  and  evaluated.  Thus  it  is  possible  to 
discuss  not  only  the  key  social,  economic,  demographic,  and  technological 
variables  that  produced  the  United  States'  modern  volunteer  force,  but  also 
the  struggles  to  shape  that  force  and  to  give  meaning  to  the  experience  of 
military  service  in  the  post-Vietnam  War  United  States.  Significantly,  many 

1  Evans,  "The  All-Volunteer  Army  After  Twenty  Years",  p.  40. 

2  Quote  in  O'Sullivan  and  Meckler,  The  Draft  and  Its  Enemies,  p.  228. 


582 


BETH  BAILEY 


of  those  at  the  forefront  of  the  move  to  an  AVF  consciously  and  purposely 
attempted  to  redefine  military  service  as  labor.  Rejecting  the  idea  that 
military  "service"  was  an  obligation  of  citizenship,  these  partisans  worked 
to  shift  decisions  about  who  would  fight  from  the  community  and  the  state 
to  the  individual  and  the  market. 

In  the  first  half  of  this  chapter  I  will  offer  a  history  of  the  move  from 
conscription-based  to  volunteer  force  in  the  United  States  and  explore 
some  of  the  major  consequences  of  that  transformation.  Looking  past  the 
formative  decade,  I  will  discuss  the  implications  of  defining  soldiering 
as  work  and  relying  on  a  national  labor  market  to  fill  the  military  ranks, 
always  reminding  readers  that  the  US  all-volunteer  force  is  the  product 
of  a  specific  historical  time  and  place.  I  will  then  situate  the  AVF  in  the 
broad  taxonomy  of  military  service  as  labor,  analyzing  it  in  relation  to 
the  standard  set  of  proposed  variables  in  order  to  allow  crossnational  and 
chronological  comparisons. 

My  analysis  here  focuses  on  the  US  Army.  While  each  force  -  the  army,  air 
force,  navy,  marines,  and  coast  guard  -  had  specific  and  somewhat  different 
experiences  in  the  transition  to  and  development  of  an  all-volunteer  force, 
the  army  was  affected  more  than  any  other  service.  As  the  largest  branch 
of  the  US  armed  forces  (with  active  component  end  strength  of  562,400  in 
2010,  compared  to  the  next  largest  branch,  the  navy's  324,239),  the  army  has 
to  recruit,  train,  and  maintain  a  much  greater  number  of  troops  than  any 
other  service.3  And,  significantly  for  a  study  of  military  service  as  labor, 
the  army  is  the  least  specialized  service,  the  one  with  the  largest  range  of 
military  occupational  specialties  (MOSs)  or,  in  language  even  the  army 
sometimes  adopted,  "jobs".4 


3  For  1960S-1970S  figures,  Steward,  American  Military  History,  pp.  372-373.  Recent  statistics 
from  Office  of  Under  Secretary  of  Defense,  Personnel  and  Readiness,  can  be  found  at  "Population 
Representation  in  the  Military  Services",  http://prhome.defense.gov/MPP/ACCESSION%20 
POLICY/PopRep20o8/contents/contents.html  (accessed  10  January  2011). 

4  The  second  reason  for  my  army  focus  is  a  practical  one.  Although  the  AVF  is  a  natural  topic 
for  labor  historians,  that  promise  has  not  yet  been  fulfilled.  Very  little  has  been  written  on  the 
post- 1973  volunteer  force,  and  most  of  what  exists  is  on  the  army.  See  Bailey,  America's  Army, 
and  Robert  K.  Griffith's  meticulously  researched  internal  history,  The  US  Army's  Transition  to  the 
All-Volunteer  Force.  Rostker,  /  Want  You!,  offers  a  detailed  policy  history  with  an  accompanying 
CD  of  archival  documents.  Given  the  multiple  differences  in  size,  structure,  organization,  and 
recruiting  strategies  among  the  services,  I  am  discussing  general  factors  leading  to  the  move 
from  a  conscription-based  to  an  all-volunteer  military,  but  focusing  on  the  implications  for  and 
actions  of  the  US  Army. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


583 


Historical  background 

From  1973  through  the  early  1980s,  the  US  Army  called  itself  the  MVA:  the 
modern  volunteer  army  "Modern",  here,  distinguished  this  volunteer  army 
from  those  that  came  before.  Although  the  draft  had  been  in  place  (with 
only  a  short  break)  since  1940,  the  United  States  had  relied  on  a  volunteer 
force  for  most  of  its  history.  In  the  beginning,  the  British  colonies  in  North 
America  had  adopted  the  British  militia  system,  which  defined  all  able- 
bodied  citizens  of  each  colony  as  members  of  a  common  militia,  jointly 
responsible  for  defense  of  their  homes.  While  this  sounds  like  universal 
military  obligation,  that  understanding  rests  on  an  anachronistic  reading  of 
"citizen".  Only  free  white  males  had  the  rights  and  obligations  of  citizenship. 
And  although  an  active  militia,  composed  of  volunteers,  stood  ready,  if  too 
few  stepped  forward,  men  could  be  conscripted  from  the  larger  common 
militia.  Even  in  such  cases,  exemptions  were  common.  More  than  two  hun- 
dred laws  offered  excuse  from  military  obligation,  and  not  surprisingly  most 
of  them  favored  the  economically  successful  and  socially  well-positioned.5 
The  militia  system  carried  over  into  the  new  nation,  despite  President 
George  Washington's  desire  for  a  standing  army  subject  to  federal  author- 
ity. It  was  not  until  the  US  Civil  War  (1861-1865)  that  a  federal  system  of 
conscription  was  implemented.  This  war  was  fought  with  mass  armies  -2.2 
million  Union  troops  and  more  than  750,000  Confederate  -  and  both  gov- 
ernments turned  to  conscription.  Nonetheless,  the  Confederacy  exempted 
slaveholders  and  in  the  north  men  were  allowed  to  purchase  "substitutes". 
And  conscription  met  with  great  resistance;  the  first  Union  draft  inductees 
were  announced  in  New  York  just  days  after  more  than  5,500  men  died  in 
the  battle  of  Gettysburg.  The  draft  riots  that  followed  cost  more  than  a 
hundred  lives.6 

From  the  Civil  War  until  1940,  the  United  States  maintained  a  small, 
volunteer,  standing  army,  turning  to  conscription  in  times  of  war.  But  in 
1940,  aware  that  the  United  States  would  not  likely  stand  apart  from  the  war 
raging  in  Europe,  President  Franklin  D.  Roosevelt  instituted  the  nation's 
first  peacetime  draft.  A  long  five  years  later,  as  the  nation  began  the  process 
of  demobilizing  the  more  than  12  million  men  and  women  in  uniform, 

5  Segal,  Recruiting  for  Uncle  Sam,  pp.  18-24.  Segal  offers  a  history  of  manpower  policy  from 
colonial  times  through  the  1980s.  Other  significant  works  on  the  selective  service  system  in  the 
twentieth  century  are  Flynn,  The  Draft,  1940-1973,  and  Chambers,  To  Raise  an  Army.  See  also 
Cohen,  Citizens  and  Soldiers. 

6  Segal,  Recruiting  for  Uncle  Sam,  pp.  25-26;  Bernstein,  The  New  York  City  Draft  Riots,  p.  5; 
Flynn,  The  Draft,  1940-1973,  pp.  167-168. 


584 


BETH  BAILEY 


Americans  assumed  that  the  draft  had  been,  once  again,  an  unwelcome 
necessity  of  war.  But  the  Cold  War  seemed  to  demand  a  large  standing  army, 
and  a  brief  experiment  with  voluntarism  left  way  too  many  boots  unfilled. 
And  then  the  North  Korean  army  crossed  the  38th  parallel. 

In  a  society  still  shadowed  by  world  war,  its  people  still  versed  in  the 
language  of  service  and  sacrifice,  military  service  and  citizen's  obligation 
remained  closely  joined.7  The  joint  congressional  committee  on  the  draft 
stated  unequivocally  in  1951  that  "the  duty  of  bearing  arms  in  defense  of  the 
nation  is  a  universal  duty",  and  Dwight  D.  Eisenhower,  former  commander- 
in-chief  of  World  War  II  Allied  expeditionary  forces  in  Europe,  insisted 
repeatedly  during  his  1952  presidential  campaign  that  military  service 
was  "an  obligation  that  every  citizen  owes  the  nation".  High  school  stu- 
dents encountered  the  familiar  argument  in  "Are  You  Ready  for  Service", 
a  filmstrip  that  was  distributed  to  classrooms  across  the  nation  by  the 
same  production  company  responsible  for  the  instructional  films  "Are  You 
Popular?"  (1947)  and  "What  to  Do  on  a  Date"  (1951),  in  which  a  World  War  II 
veteran  explained  to  his  sons,  one  already  in  uniform,  that  military  service 
was  the  most  significant  obligation  of  citizenship.8 

Though  young  American  men  were  subject  to  the  draft,  those  charged 
with  defending  the  nation's  security  saw  a  new  world  in  which  victory  would 
be  won  through  scientific  and  technological  development,  not  with  the 
mass  armies  of  the  past.  (In  fact,  the  overarching  message  of  "Are  You  Ready 
for  Service"  was:  stay  in  school.)  The  director  of  the  Scientific  Manpower 
Commission  argued,  rather  coldheartedly,  that  a  GI  was  quickly  trained 
whereas  a  physicist  was  not,  and  such  reasoning  supported  deferments 
not  only  for  students  studying  science  and  technology  but  for  most  college 
students  who  managed  to  pass  their  courses.9  These  deferments,  however, 
were  not  especially  controversial  because  so  few  men  were  drafted. 

In  the  years  following  World  War  II  the  children  born  of  the  postwar 
American  baby  boom  moved  though  American  society  like,  as  people  said 
at  the  time,  a  pig  in  a  python.  The  population  bulge  that  caused  elementary 
schools  to  sprout  on  the  American  landscape  at  the  beginning  of  the  1950s 
translated  into  a  flood  of  young  men  eligible  for  military  service  in  the  early 
1960s.  There  were  8  million  men  between  the  ages  of  nineteen  and  twenty- 

7  For  a  more  complete  version  of  this  discussion,  see  Bailey,  America's  Army,  pp.  1-33. 

8  Flynn,  The  Draft,  7940-7973,  pp.  136, 164;  "Service  and  Citizenship",  part  3  of  Are  You  Ready 
for  Service?  (Coronet  Instructional  Films,  1951),  Prelinger  Archives,  www.archive.org  (accessed 
December  2011). 

9  Flynn,  The  Draft,  1940-1973,  pp.  140, 148. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


585 


five  in  1958;  six  years  later  there  were  12  million.  At  the  same  time,  the  army 
(by  far  the  largest  service)  had  fallen  from  1.5  million  to  860,000  active 
troops  over  the  course  of  the  1950s.10  Abundance  created  its  own  challenges: 
deferment  categories  were  expanded;  qualifications  were  raised  -  but  there 
were  still  too  many  men  available  for  a  shrinking  armed  forces,  and  no  way 
to  conceive  of  enough  legitimate  deferments  to  manage  the  glut  of  available 
manpower.  The  Pentagon  discussed  ending  the  draft  in  1958;  the  issue  got 
some  attention  again  during  the  i960  presidential  election,  as  Democrats 
criticized  the  existing  system,  and  in  1964  Republican  presidential  candi- 
date Barry  Goldwater,  true  to  his  libertarian  values,  announced  that  he 
would  end  the  draft  if  elected  and  incumbent  Lyndon  B.Johnson  ordered 
yet  another  study  of  the  issue.  But  in  1965  Johnson  authorized  a  large-scale 
buildup  of  American  ground  troops  in  Vietnam  and,  in  an  attempt  to  deflect 
national  attention  from  the  escalation,  decided  to  rely  on  the  draft  instead 
of  activating  the  reserves.11 

Transition  to  an  all-volunteer  force 

On  17  October  19  68  -  two  and  a  half  weeks  before  the  presidential  election, 
and  at  the  height  of  American  involvement  in  the  Vietnam  War  -  Republican 
candidate  Richard  M.  Nixon  proposed  to  end  the  draft.  It  was  not  quite  so 
radical  a  proposal  as  it  sounds;  Nixon  made  clear  that  conscription  would 
continue  in  some  form  until  the  United  States  resolved  its  role  in  Vietnam. 
Nonetheless,  he  pledged,  if  elected  president,  to  begin  moving  immediately 
toward  that  goal.12 

Nixon's  motivations  were,  of  course,  primarily  political.  He  meant  to 
shake  up  the  campaign  in  its  final  days,  to  show  himself  as  someone  capable 
of  thinking  boldly  and  of  taking  action.  Nixon  had  chosen  an  issue  that 
mattered  to  a  great  many  Americans  and,  if  many  of  them  did  not  cross 
party  lines  to  vote  for  Nixon,  they  nonetheless  supported  his  plan.  By  the 
late  1960s  there  was,  in  effect,  a  perfect  storm  of  factors  that  led  to  the  end 
of  conscription,  some  of  which  had  little  directly  to  do  with  the  military:  a 
strong  and  widespread  sentiment  that  the  draft  was  not  fair,  a  demographic 

10  Flynn,  The  Draft,  1940-79/3,  pp.  165, 169;  Segal,  Recruiting  for  Uncle  Sam,  p.  33. 

11  On  Johnson's  decision,  see  Olson  and  Roberts,  Where  the  Domino  Fell,  p.  127,  and  Dallek, 
Flawed  Giant,  pp.  271-277. 

12  Richard  Nixon,  "The  All-Volunteer  Armed  Force",  address  on  CBS  radio  network,  17  October 
1968,  in  All-Volunteer  Army-Misc,  Center  of  Military  History,  Fort  McNair,  Washington,  DC. 


586 


BETH  BAILEY 


bulge  in  the  draft-age  population,  attempts  by  liberals  and  the  left  to  make 
it  more  difficult  to  send  troops  to  war,  newly  powerful  claims  that  the  free 
market  provided  the  best  solution  to  most  problems,  and  shifting  pos- 
sibilities for  women  and  members  of  ethnic  and  racial  minority  groups  in 
American  society.  Nonetheless,  it  was  the  Nixon  administration's  concerted 
efforts  that  brought  an  end  to  the  draft.13 

Many,  in  early  1969,  believed  that  Nixon's  promise  had  been  no  more  than 
last-minute  politics,  a  move  meant  to  sway  wavering  supporters  in  a  time 
of  enormous  political  anger  and  national  division.  After  all,  Nixon  had  not 
discussed  his  proposal  with  the  Pentagon,  with  military  leaders,  or  with 
members  of  Congress.  Nonetheless,  one  of  his  first  actions  as  president  was 
to  establish  the  President's  Commission  on  the  All-Volunteer  Force,  a  group 
of  civilian  and  former  military  leaders  that  was  charged  not  with  exploring 
the  possibility  of  an  AVF,  but  with  crafting  a  plan  to  create  one. 

The  commission,  often  referred  to  as  the  Gates  Commission  because  it 
was  chaired  by  former  secretary  of  defense  Thomas  Gates,  included  both 
civilian  and  retired  military  members.14  At  the  beginning,  opinion  was 
divided  and  Gates  himself  told  President  Nixon  that  he  was  opposed  to 
the  change.  This  group,  over  several  months,  moved  from  initial  divisions 
to  a  unanimous  report.  That  was  due,  in  large  part,  to  the  sorts  of  evidence 
they  considered.  The  frame  of  the  debate  had  been  set  well  before  the  com- 
mission heard  testimony  or  considered  evidence.  It  was  the  staff,  not  the 
commissioners,  who  proposed  the  agendas,  directed  the  research,  gathered 
the  evidence,  drafted  the  report.  And  four  of  the  five  staff  members  were 
anti-conscription  free-market  economists  with  significant  public  reputa- 
tions of  their  own.  It  is  not  that  they  were  able  to  impose  their  opinions 
on  the  distinguished  members  of  the  commission  -  it  is  hard  to  imagine 
retired  four-star  generals  and  a  former  secretary  of  defense  being  pushed 
around  by  their  staff-  it  was  that  they  asked  certain  types  of  questions  and 
provided  evidence  to  answer  them.  Believing  in  clear  data  and  quantifiable 
proof,  they  had  little  patience  for  qualitative  questions  about  the  meaning 
of  military  service  or  the  obligations  of  citizenship.  Their  carefully  gathered 
data  supported  the  "hidden  tax"  argument.  Their  evaluation  of  economic 
variables  strengthened  the  arguments  of  the  three  free-market  economists 

13  For  a  more  complete  discussion  of  Nixon's  proposal  and  the  Gates  Commission,  see  Bailey, 
America's  Army,  pp.  21-33. 

14  For  records  of  the  President's  Commission  on  an  All-Volunteer  Armed  Force  (the  Gates 
Commission),  see  the  Lauris  Norstad  Papers  and  the  Alfred  M.  Gruenther  Papers,  Dwight  David 
Eisenhower  Library,  Abilene,  Kansas  [henceforth,  DDEL], 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


587 


who  sat  on  the  commission:  Milton  Friedman,  Alan  Greenspan,  and  W. 
Allen  Wallis.  Thus,  while  opposition  to  the  draft  took  a  wide  variety  of  forms, 
the  report  that  would  structure  the  new  AVF  built  on  one  key  premise:  the 
military  must  compete  more  effectively  in  the  national  labor  market.  The 
main  answer  the  Gates  Commission  offered  was  competitive  wages. 

The  strongest  opposition  to  the  move  came  from  the  armed  services, 
though  once  confronted  with  an  order  from  their  commander-in-chief  all 
generally  worked  hard  to  put  successful  plans  in  place.  From  the  military 
and  the  general  public,  there  were  three  major  objections  to  the  end  of  the 
draft. 

The  first  was  philosophical.  Those  who  believed  that  military  service  was 
an  obligation  of  citizenship  worried  about  the  centrality  of  money  in  this 
new  model.  One  member  of  the  Gates  Commission  initially  noted  that  he 
had  "serious  philosophical  reservations  about  paying  people  to  die  for  their 
country",  to  which  Milton  Friedman  replied  that  he  did  "not  see  how  morale 
and  effectiveness  were  enhanced  by  paying  people  substandard  wages",  for 
the  "logic  of  such  an  approach  would  dictate  paying  them  nothing".'5  Even 
though,  in  the  end,  the  commission  report  was  unanimous,  some  members 
remained  convinced  that  there  were  moral  issues  that  could  not  be  reduced 
to  economic  terms.  And  in  both  public  discussions  and  congressional  hear- 
ings, the  term  "mercenary"  was  frequently  used. 

The  second  objection,  voiced  most  strongly  by  members  of  the  military, 
was  that  military  service  is  not  simply  a  job  nor  the  military  simply  an 
employer.  It  was  not  only  the  risks  that  were  different,  but  the  other  de- 
mands: the  military  required  immediate  obedience  to  authority;  it  exercised 
control  over  almost  all  aspects  of  individuals'  lives;  it  attempted  to  separate 
its  members  from  the  comforts  and  distractions  of  civilian  society.  And 
while  some  civilian  workers  might  risk  their  lives  in  the  course  of  their 
work  -  police  officers,  firefighters  -  none  of  them  could  be  ordered  to  kill. 
From  a  different  vantage,  others  argued  that  men  who  think  of  military 
service  primarily  as  a  job,  who  are  drawn  by  the  promise  of  a  wage,  simply 
would  not  make  good  soldiers. 

Finally,  many  commentators  and  analysts  worried  that  it  was  imprudent 
to  leave  the  military  at  the  mercy  of  the  market.  Some  argued  that  the  mili- 
tary might  not  compete  well  in  the  open  market  -  a  reasonable  assumption 
at  the  end  of  an  unpopular  war,  though  the  economic  downturn  that  began 
in  1973  did  create  more  fertile  ground  for  recruiters.  Others  feared  that  the 

15  Gates  Commission,  Minutes  of  13  May  1969  meeting,  9,  folder  1,  box  1,  and  Minutes  of 
6  September  1969  meeting,  p.  23,  folder  5,  box  1,  both  in  Gruenther  Papers,  DDEL. 


588 


BETH  BAILEY 


AVF  would  simply  replace  the  selective  service  system  with  an  "economic 
draft"  and  that  the  new  all-volunteer  force  would  be  filled  with  poor,  alien- 
ated African  American  men  (though  some  were  objecting  to  such  potential 
exploitation  while  others  worried  about  angry  black  men  with  guns  and 
weapons  training).  Still  others  quoted  the  chair  of  the  House  Armed  Services 
Committee's  claim:  the  only  way  to  get  a  volunteer  force  would  be  to  draft 
one.  They  believed  it  just  could  not  be  done.  In  the  end,  however,  almost 
all  involved  in  the  debates  over  the  AVF  believed  the  volunteer  force  would 
serve  as  the  core  of  the  US  military  and  as  the  nation's  peacetime  force.  In 
the  event  of  a  major  conflict  or  long-lasting  war,  they  assumed,  the  United 
States  would  once  again  turn  to  the  draft. 

Implementation 

The  military  did,  in  fact,  face  an  enormous  challenge,  and  the  army  most 
of  all.  In  the  wake  of  a  war  gone  badly  wrong,  an  unpopular  institution 
wracked  by  internal  crisis  had  to  recruit  20,000  to  30,000  young  Americans  a 
month  (by  contrast,  in  2010  army  recruiting  aimed  for  approximately  65,000 
nonprior-service  recruits  a  year)  from  a  racially,  culturally,  and  politically 
divided  society  in  which  young  people  were  overwhelmingly  opposed  to 
the  military  and  more  comfortable  with  the  urging  to  "question  authority" 
than  with  an  automatic  "yes,  sir".  As  one  quick  illustration:  a  carefully 
conducted  survey  in  April  1971  discovered  that  88  per  cent  of  young  men 
either  "probably"  or  "definitely"  did  not  want  to  join  the  army.16 

Faced  with  such  grim  prospects,  the  army  began  two  linked  efforts, 
each  of  which  relied,  at  least  partially,  on  models  of  civilian  labor  or  the 
market.  During  the  early  1970s,  in  an  attempt  to  improve  its  image,  the 
army  initiated  a  series  of  highly  publicized  reforms.  Many  were  based  on 
research  into  what  young  people  would  find  acceptable  work  conditions 
and  often  relied  on  analogies  to  the  civilian  workplace.  In  the  early  1970s 
potential  volunteers  were  promised  forty-hour  work-weeks  and  paid  vaca- 
tions. Announcing  the  end  of  reveille  and  bed-checks,  army  reformers  made 
the  point  that  civilian  bosses  did  not  check  to  see  if  their  employees  were 


16  Rome  Arnold  &  Company,  "US  Army  Recruiting  Advertising  Test",  conducted  for  US  Army 
Recruiting  and  N.W.  Ayer  &  Son,  Inc.,  September  1971,  p.  3,  All-Volunteer  Army  Collection, 
Military  History  Institute  (AVA-MHI),  Carlisle,  PA. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


589 


in  bed  at  10  p.m.17  More  sophisticated  arguments  also  used  the  language  of 
work.  When  Pete  Dawkins,  a  young  and  highly  decorated  major  who  had, 
while  at  West  Point,  won  the  Heisman  Trophy  for  the  most  outstanding 
player  in  American  college  football,  testified  before  Congress  about  the 
coming  "modern  volunteer  army",  he  played  down  the  reform  of  living 
conditions  and  the  army's  newly  competitive  pay,  emphasizing  instead  a 
different  aspect  of  labor.  To  attract  volunteers,  he  argued,  the  army  would 
need  to  offer  recruits  "the  ability  to  grow  in  one's  work,  the  ability  to  achieve 
recognition  for  achievement,  the  opportunity  to  really  have  work  chal- 
lenges [...]."  The  army  Dawkins  envisioned  would  offer  the  satisfaction  of 
meaningful  labor.18 

The  military  also  began  trying  to  compete  more  effectively  in  the  labor 
market,  offering  benefits  that  research  suggested  would  attract  the  sort 
of  volunteers  they  wanted:  bonuses  for  enlistment,  money  for  college,  job 
training,  leadership  skills,  travel,  adventure,  and  (initially,  for  women) 
good  marriage  prospects.  Far-sighted  reformers  also  began  to  focus  on 
advertising.19  This  was  also,  in  a  different  sense,  a  turn  to  the  market,  though 
a  market  more  broadly  defined.  Economists  had,  at  that  time,  not  yet  begun 
to  factor  irrational  forces  into  their  calculations  and  the  economists  whose 
arguments  shaped  the  Gates  Commission  conclusions  had  relied  on  fairly 
basic  labor  models  of  supply,  demand,  and  competitive  wages.  Offer  young 
men  a  decent  wage,  they  claimed,  and  a  sufficient  number  would  enlist. 
Individuals  would  make  decisions  based  on  rational  understandings  of 
their  own  economic  self-interest. 

These,  however,  were  not  days  of  measured  rationality  in  American 
society.  And  the  market,  in  1970s  America,  was  not  simply  a  realm  of  rational 
economic  choice.  It  was  a  site  of  consumer  desire;  it  was  a  volatile  space 
of  inchoate  needs,  hopes,  and  fears.  These  military  officers,  paradoxically, 
understood  the  complexity  of  this  "market"  better  than  the  Chicago  School 
economists.  They  adopted  consumer  capitalism's  most  powerful  tools,  turn- 
ing to  the  most  sophisticated  marketing  and  advertising  firms  of  the  day  in 
attempts  to  discover  what  young  people  wanted  and  sell  it  back  to  them  in 
the  shape  of  the  military.  Although  the  slogans  varied  ("Today's  Army  Wants 

17  On  civilian  employers,  see  Leavitt  A.  Knight,  Jr.,  "What  the  Army  Is  Doing  to  Make  Out 
without  the  Draft,",  American  Legion  Magazine,  April  1971,  p.  4.  For  a  more  detailed  discussion 
of  army  reforms,  see  Bailey,  America's  Army,  pp.  34-66. 

18  Dawkins's  comments  in  Special  Subcommittee  on  Recruiting  and  Retention  of  Military 
Personnel,  House  Committee  on  Armed  Services,  Recruiting  and  Retention  of  Military  Personnel, 
29  September  1971,  p.  59;  quotation  is  from  unedited  transcript  of  hearings  in  AVA-MHI. 

19  See  Bailey,  "The  Army  in  the  Marketplace". 


590 


BETH  BAILEY 


to  Join  You"  was  the  initial  campaign),  all  attempted  to  convince  young 
people  that  military  service  was  not  about  obligation,  but  opportunity 

That  opportunity  took  different  forms.  Some  of  it  was  slightly  miscon- 
ceived reassurance:  the  initial  advertisements  made  the  unlikely  claim 
that  joining  the  army  required  no  sacrifice  of  individuality  -  an  important 
concept  to  70s  youth  -  not  even  the  traditional  "skin-head"  haircut.  At  the 
same  time,  these  ads  offered  a  chance  to  "build  your  mind  and  body  [...] 
further  your  education,  become  expert  at  a  skill,  have  opportunities  for 
advancement,  travel,  and  30  days  vacation  a  year".  One  series  of  advertise- 
ments asked  potential  volunteers  to  "Take  the  Army's  16-month  tour  of 
Europe",  a  witty  turn  on  the  multiple  meanings  of  tour  that  conflated  the 
army  tour  of  duty  with  the  grand  tour  of  Europe  that  more  prosperous 
youth  enjoyed.  But  many  ads  made  a  more  basic  offer.  "We've  got  over  300 
good,  steady  jobs",  read  the  headline  on  a  Reader's  Digest  advertisement  that 
prompted  more  than  30,000  young  men  to  send  in  postcards  requesting 
more  information.  Another  ad  inquired,  "What  are  you  doing  after  school?"20 

Initial  results  of  the  move  to  an  AVF:  "quality",  race,  and  gender 

The  turn  to  the  labor  market  would  have  profound  implications  for  the 
composition  of  the  army.  Even  though  selective  service  system  regulations 
had  allowed  college  youth  to  defer  or  avoid  military  service  in  high  numbers 
over  the  previous  decades,  and  even  though  military  reliance  on  quantita- 
tive test  scores  to  sort  draftees  into  different  military  occupations  meant 
that  more  privileged  youth  were  less  likely  to  find  themselves  on  the  front 
lines,  the  draft  did  reach  more  widely  and  deeply  through  American  society 
than  would  a  volunteer  force. 

The  army  entered  the  national  job  market  with  a  great  disadvantage  in 
that  historical  moment.  While  it  continued  to  draw  young  men  and  women 
who  had  a  family  military  tradition  or  other  cultural  reasons  to  enlist,  few 
of  those  who  had  other  options  chose  to  enter  the  military  in  the  immediate 
aftermath  of  the  Vietnam  War.  In  the  early  years  of  the  all-volunteer  force, 
the  army  relied  primarily  on  those  young  men  who  were  least  competitive 


20  Advertisements  created  for  the  US  Army  by  N.W.  Ayer  are  collected  in  the  N.W.  Ayer  Advertis- 
ing Records,  Archives  Center,  National  Museum  of  American  History,  Smithsonian  Institution, 
Washington,  DC. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


591 


in  the  civilian  labor  market.21  As  the  unemployment  rate  skyrocketed  in 
the  early  1970s,  from  4.9  per  cent  1973  to  8.5  per  cent  1975  (or  16.1  per  cent 
for  sixteen-  to  twenty-four-year-olds),  the  military  had  greater  appeal.  But 
the  army  still  struggled  to  find  a  quarter-million  nonprior  service  recruits 
a  year,  and  struggled  also  with  the  fact  that  the  men  the  marketplace  most 
easily  supplied  were  not  those  deemed  "high-quality". 

"Quality",  according  to  the  US  military,  is  a  quantifiable  term  based  on 
two  key  criteria.  A  high-quality  recruit  holds  an  earned  high  school  diploma 
(not  a  GED)  and  scores  in  the  top  half  of  the  Armed  Forces  Qualification 
Test  (AFQT)  portion  of  what  is  now  called  the  ASVAB  (Armed  Services 
Vocational  Aptitude  Battery).  Test  scores  are  divided  into  five  categories, 
which  fall  into  a  bell  curve.  Thus  scores  that  fall  into  categories  Till  A  signal 
"high-quality".  To  make  clear  what  military  and  civilian  leaders  were  argu- 
ing about:  no  one  had  a  problem  with  category  IIIB  recruits  or  even,  in  many 
cases,  category  IVA.  But  the  10-15  AFQT  scores  that  put  potential  recruits 
into  CAT  I VB  were,  according  to  the  army,  roughly  equivalent  to  IQ  scores  of 
71-81.  In  the  early  1970s,  the  army  was  permitted  18  per  cent  CAT  IV  nonprior 
service  recruits  a  year;  currently  the  limit  is  2  per  cent. 

Some  of  those  involved  in  the  transition,  most  particularly  in  these  early 
days,  insisted  that  "quality"  did  not  matter.  A  body  is  a  body,  after  all,  and 
what  mattered  most  was  filling  boots.  Others,  those  who  would  win  the 
day,  argued  that  modern  warfare  requires  soldiers  of  above-average  mental 
capacity  and  the  sort  of  day-to-day  discipline  shown  by  completing  a  high 
school  degree.  Army  studies,  over  time,  found  that  those  who  fell  into 
the  bottom  of  CAT  IV  were  very  difficult  to  train  for  even  basic  technical 
tasks;  ultimately,  only  about  one-third  of  such  recruits  were  capable  of  the 
basic  tasks  expected  in  the  modern  army.  Such  concerns,  however,  were 
subsumed  in  political  debate.  The  White  House,  aware  that  the  army  was 
not  wholeheartedly  enthusiastic  about  the  move  to  an  AVF,  claimed  that 
discussions  of  quality  were  simply  an  attempt  to  sabotage  the  volunteer 
force.  And  the  Department  of  Defense  dismissed  army  concerns:  "how  many 
Vietcong  have  PhDs?"  was  the  slightly  contemptuous  phrasing.22 

Concern  about  quality  was  complicated  by  the  fact  that  African  Ameri- 
cans were  significantly  more  likely  than  whites  to  fall  into  the  "low-quality" 
category.  Virtually  everyone  involved  in  the  discussion  pointed  to  socioeco- 

21  For  a  more  complete  discussion  of  "quality"  and  market  forces,  see  Bailey,  America's  Army, 
pp.  88-129. 

22  Griffith,  The  US  Army's  Transition  to  the  All-Volunteer  Force,  pp.  186-188;  George  Doust, 
interview  by  Robert  K.  Griffith,  30  March  1983,  AVA-MHI. 


592 


BETH  BAILEY 


nomic  explanations:  inferior  schools,  disadvantaged  backgrounds  -  but,  in 
that  era  of  powerful  racial  division,  all  discussions  of  quality  were  shadowed 
by  the  explosive  topic  of  race.  When,  in  the  mid-1970s,  Bo  Callaway,  who 
served  as  Nixon's  and  Gerald  R.  Ford's  secretary  of  the  army,  attempted  to 
raise  the  quality  of  army  recruits  by  mandating  higher  cut-offs  across  racial 
lines,  opponents  charged  that  he  was  trying  to  limit  the  number  of  black 
soldiers.  The  next  secretary  of  the  army,  Clifford  Alexander,  agreed.  He 
insisted  that  the  army's  measure  of  quality  -  the  high  school  diploma  and  a 
I-III A  AFQT  score  -  was  unnecessary  and  prejudicial,  and  he  had  the  scores 
removed  from  the  files  of  400,000  soldiers  in  order  to  prevent  their  "abuse".23 
(The  scores  did  indeed  shape  soldiers'  careers,  helping  to  determine  not  only 
initial  MOS  but  also  the  course  of  promotion  and  advancement.) 

Alexander  argued  that  the  army  should  measure  individual  accomplish- 
ment and  success  rather  than  relying  on  such  scores,  as  they  predicted 
success  or  failure  only  in  the  aggregate  and  so  ruled  out  many  potentially 
successful  soldiers.  Army  proponents  conceded  his  point,  but  argued  for 
efficiency.  One  thousand  recruits  with  high  school  diplomas  yielded  940 
soldiers  at  the  end  of  six  months.  It  took  1,400  recruits  without  earned  high 
school  diplomas  to  yield  the  same  number  of  soldiers.24 

Despite  all  the  debate,  the  labor  market  was  functioning:  individuals 
were  making  decisions,  weighing  the  army  against  other  forms  of  labor. 
Some  of  their  decisions  were  economically  rational.  Although  Congress 
had  increased  military  pay  rates  to  equal  those  of  basic  entry-level  civilian 
jobs  in  1973,  wages  did  not  keep  pace  with  inflation  or  the  civilian  scale  and 
became  steadily  less  competitive  over  the  course  of  the  decade.  Cultural 
and  ideological  reasons  also  played  a  role;  antimilitarism  did  not  disappear 
with  the  end  of  the  war  in  Vietnam. 

By  the  end  of  the  1970s,  the  all-volunteer  free-market  army  was  in  crisis. 
Forty-one  per  cent  of  the  army's  enlisted  ranks  were  high  school  dropouts. 
According  to  a  study  done  in  1976  at  Fort  Benning,  site  of  army  basic  train- 
ing, 53  per  cent  of  men  read  at  or  below  fifth-grade  level  (roughly  age  ten). 
The  army  began  rewriting  training  manuals,  moving  from  eleventh-  to 
seventh-grade  reading  level,  and  then  to  comic  books.  The  American  press 
reported  to  US  citizens  and  other  interested  observers  around  the  world 
that  90  per  cent  of  nuclear-weapons  maintenance  specialists  had  failed 

23  "Doubts  Mounting  about  All-Volunteer  Force",  Science,  5  September  1980,  pp.  1095-1099. 

24  Robert  B.  Pirie  testimony,  Subcommittee  on  Manpower  and  Personnel,  Senate  Armed 
Services  Committee,  "Department  of  Defense  Authorization  for  Appropriations  for  FY81,  part 
3:  Manpower  and  Personnel",  10  March  1980,  96th  Cong.,  2nd  sess.,  p.  1290. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


593 


their  qualification  tests  in  1978,  as  had  82  per  cent  of  Hawk  surface-to-air 
missile  crews.  As  a  June  1980  cover  story  in  Time  magazine  noted,  falling 
capabilities  fit  poorly  with  the  rising  complexity  of  weaponry:  the  modern 
Blackhawk  helicopter,  for  example,  had  "257  knobs  and  switches,  135  circuit 
breakers,  62  displays  and  11.7  sq.  feet  of  instruments  and  controls".  At  the 
same  time,  social  problems  undermined  discipline  and  capability.  Crime 
was  rampant,  drugs  and  alcohol  abuse  endemic,  desertion  common.  Faith 
in  the  AVF,  never  strong,  plummeted.  In  1978  an  American  television 
network  ran  a  documentary  titled  "The  American  Army:  A  Shocking  Case 
of  Incompetence". 25 

What  seemed  like  domestic  debates  about  the  success  or  failure  of  the 
AVF  took  on  new  weight  in  1979,  when  Iranian  protesters  overran  the  US 
embassy  in  Tehran,  taking  hostages,  and  the  eventual  military  rescue 
mission  failed,  leaving  eight  US  servicemen  dead.  The  Soviet  invasion  of 
Afghanistan  on  Christmas  Eve  1979  added  new  pressures.  In  the  midst  of 
international  turmoil,  with  the  clear  possibility  of  military  action,  stories 
of  a  military  in  crisis  had  new  resonance.  In  the  face  of  such  international 
instability  and  widespread  concern  about  the  quality  of  the  US  military, 
President  Jimmy  Carter  asked  Congress  to  reinstate  registration  for  the 
draft.  He  was  not  proposing  an  end  to  the  military's  all-volunteer  status, 
but  wanted  the  draft  mechanism  in  place  in  case  it  was  needed. 

As  the  turn  to  the  labor  market  initially  left  the  army  in  a  crisis  of  qual- 
ity, it  also  fundamentally  changed  its  composition.  The  selective  service 
system  had  mechanisms  that  could  be  used  to  create  a  roughly  proportional 
representation  by  race;  the  new  AVF  did  not.  Very  quickly,  the  percentage  of 
African  American  men  began  to  rise.  Black  men  who  had  suffered  in  a  civil- 
ian job  market  characterized  by  racial  discrimination  found  opportunity 
in  the  military,  and  that  opportunity  was,  in  part,  due  to  the  functioning 
of  the  labor  market.  In  the  initial  years  of  the  AVF  the  army  could  not 
attract  enough  well-qualified  men,  and  African  American  men  (who  were, 
in  aggregate,  less  likely  to  be  well  educated  and  otherwise  competitive 
in  the  civilian  job  market)  took  advantage  of  the  disparity  in  supply  and 
demand.  And,  in  various  ways,  the  army  encouraged  black  enlistment.  An 
army  recruiting  ad  that  ran  in  Ebony,  a  popular  magazine  aimed  at  African 
Americans,  read:  "It's  tough  to  get  ahead  when  you  start  so  far  behind.  No 
skills.  No  experience.  No  jobs  to  look  forward  to,  except  the  ones  anyone 


25  "Who'll  Fight  for  America"  (cover  story),  Time,  9  June  1980,  pp.  24,  25;  see  Bailey,  America's 
Army,  pp.  120-122. 


594 


BETH  BAILEY 


can  do."26  By  1974,  30  per  cent  of  new  accessions  were  black,  compared  to 
slightly  over  11  per  cent  of  the  US  population.  Many  of  them  were  men 
who  could  find  no  other  jobs,  and  a  high  percentage  of  black  volunteers 
were  designated  "low-quality".  Those  recruits  did  not  qualify  for  technical 
MOSs  or  for  any  field  that  required  significant  advanced  training.  Thus  a 
disproportionate  number  of  African  American  volunteers  were  allocated 
to  the  combat  arms. 

It  is  not  surprising  that  critics  claimed  exploitation.  African  American 
men  had  died  in  disproportionate  numbers  during  the  early  years  of  the 
Vietnam  War,  and  even  after  the  Pentagon  attempted  to  make  certain  that 
black  soldiers  were  not  overrepresented  on  the  front  lines,  the  language  of 
"cannon  fodder"  and  "genocide"  persisted.  These  were,  as  well,  days  of  racial 
division  and  anger  both  in  the  United  States  and  in  its  military.  Charlie 
Rangel,  the  congressman  who  would  continue  to  argue  against  the  AVF 
through  the  first  decade  of  the  twenty-first  century,  claimed  that  the  all- 
volunteer  force  was  simply  conscription  by  another  name,  the  drafting  of 
the  poor  and  black  under  the  language  of  choice.27 

What  is  more  surprising  is  the  counterargument,  which  found  legitimacy 
in  the  army's  attempt  to  reposition  itself  during  the  transition  to  an  AVF. 
The  key  spokesman  for  this  position  was  Ron  Dellums,  an  African  American 
former  marine  with  an  MA  in  social  work  from  the  University  of  California, 
Berkeley,  who  was  elected  to  the  US  Congress  on  an  antiwar  platform  in  1970. 
What,  he  asked,  if  the  army  really  was,  as  it  claimed,  about  opportunity? 
What  if  there  were  no  war?  What  if  the  army  did  offer  good,  steady  jobs? 
Should  African  Americans  not  have  equal  access  to  them?  Should  African 
Americans  not,  finally,  have  equal  opportunity?28  These  were  difficult  con- 
versations, especially  in  conjunction  with  concerns  about  quality.  During 
the  1980s  and  1990s,  as  overall  "quality"  numbers  rose  dramatically,  African 
Americans  (both  male  and  female)  continued  to  enlist  in  disproportion- 
ate numbers.  During  the  1990s,  however,  59  per  cent  of  African  American 
recruits  scored  in  the  upper  half  of  exam  results  (CAT  IIIA  or  higher).  These 
"high-quality"  recruits  had  options,  both  within  the  military  and  outside 
it,  and  disproportionately  few  chose  combat  arms.29 

26  Advertisement  in  Ebony,  December  1972. 

27  Charles  B.  Rangel,  "Black  Hessians  in  a  White  Man's  Army",  New  York  Times,  17  April  1971, 
p.  29. 

28  Dellums,  Lying  Down  with  Lions;  Dellums's  1974  correspondence  in  Rostker,  /  Want  You!, 
accompanying  CD  (G0548.pdf). 

29  Moskos  and  Butler,  Alt  That  We  Can  Be,  pp.  39-40. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


595 


The  changing  racial  demographics  of  the  army  during  this  time  of  transi- 
tion concerned  many  Americans.  But  the  change  in  racial  demographics 
required  much  less  management  than  did  the  growth  in  the  number  of 
women.  The  shift  from  conscription-based  to  all-volunteer  military  had 
an  enormous  impact  on  women  in  the  military,  both  their  numbers  and 
functions.  Of  course  activists  in  the  women's  movement  of  the  1960s  and 
1970s  played  a  significant  role  in  creating  new  opportunities  for  women 
in  the  military,  as  they  insisted  that  women  deserved  equal  rights  and 
opportunities  and  mounted  legal  challenges  support  their  claims.  But  it 
was  the  move  to  the  labor  market  that  jumpstarted  the  full  integration  of 
women  into  the  United  States'  armed  forces.30  The  President's  Commission 
on  the  All-Volunteer  Force,  in  a  case  of  extreme  short-sightedness,  had  not 
factored  women  into  any  of  its  quantitative  market  calculations  about 
the  feasibility  of  filling  the  ranks  (aside  from  a  proposal  to  dispense  with 
women  altogether),  but  army  planners  quickly  understood  that  the  army 
would  have  to  increase  the  percentage  of  women  in  the  army  in  order  to 
meet  recruiting  goals.31 

This  would  be  a  major  transformation.  According  to  legislation  passed  in 
1948,  women  could  not  comprise  more  than  2  per  cent  of  the  nation's  mili- 
tary. That  limit  had  been  dropped  in  1967,  but  its  legacy  remained:  in  1971, 
women  made  up  only  1.3  per  cent  of  the  military's  enlisted  ranks.  When  the 
US  Army  moved  to  all-volunteer  status  in  1973,  women  were  still  members  of 
a  separate  "Women's  Army  Corps".  Women  could  not  hold  a  permanent  rank 
higher  than  Lt.  Colonel.  Pregnancy  brought  mandatory  discharge.  Married 
women  could  not  enlist  (though  women  could  marry  while  in  the  service), 
nor  could  women  with  children  under  the  age  of  eighteen.  Women  were 
restricted  to  just  over  one-third  of  military  occupational  specialties  (MOS), 
but  fewer  than  1.5  per  cent  of  actual  army  positions  were  open  to  women.32 

From  1971  to  1979,  army  enlisted  ranks  moved  from  1.2  per  cent  female 
to  8.4  per  cent  female  (for  the  entire  military,  figures  were  1.3  to  7.6  per 

30  The  discussion  of  women  is  drawn  from  Bailey,  America's  Army,  pp.  130-171.  Key  works  on 
women  in  the  military  include  Morden,  The  Women's  Army  Corps;  Binkin  and  Bach,  Women  and 
the  Military;  Franke,  Ground  Zero;  and  Stiehm,  Arms  and  the  Enlisted. 

31  Gates  Commission,  Minutes  of  i2-i3july  1969  meeting,  p.  20;  Forrester  to  Rogers,  "A  Concept 
for  Expanded  Use  of  Women  in  the  Army,  February  22, 1973,  in  Gen.  Bailey's  Background  Papers, 
1971-1975,  WAC  99,  box  14,  Women's  Army  Corps,  1945-1978,  RG  319,  National  Archives  and 
Records  Administration,  College  Park,  MD;  Army  75  Personnel  Concept  Study,  prepared  by 
Battelle  Institute  under  contract  to  Personnel  Studies  and  Research,  Office  of  the  Deputy  Chief 
of  Staff  for  Personnel,  in  "Women  and  the  AVF"  folder,  AVA-MHI. 

32  Binkin  and  Bach,  Women  and  the  Military,  pp.  27-28;  Morden,  The  Women's  Army  Corps, 
pp.  265-269,  285. 


596 


BETH  BAILEY 


cent).  This  shift  mirrored  changes  taking  place  in  American  society,  as 
economic  crises  propelled  more  women  into  the  workforce  and  a  powerful 
women's  movement  challenged  traditional  limits  on  women's  public  and 
workplace  roles.  But  the  rapid  growth  of  women  in  the  armed  forces  was 
also  a  byproduct  of  the  shift  from  powerful  cultural  traditions  of  military 
service  to  the  structural  imperatives  of  labor-market  capitalism. 

As  the  army  relied  increasingly  on  women,  it  had  to  reconsider  the  roles 
women  were  allowed  to  play.  In  1972,  the  army  ended  restrictions  on  all 
MOSs  except  combat  arms.  However,  as  the  civilian  labor  market  had  done 
until  the  practice  was  outlawed  by  the  Civil  Rights  Act  of  1964,  the  army 
continued  to  designate  each  position  -  not  only  general  job  categories  but 
individual  slots  -  by  gender:  M,  F,  or  I  (for  interchangeable).  In  1973,  under 
structural  pressure,  the  army  began  reevaluating  the  gender  designation 
for  each  of  the  individual  slots.33  Realizing  that  if  the  army  needed  women 
who  wanted  to  repair  trucks  it  likely  should  not  advertise  for  women  who 
were  concerned  about  their  "femininity",  the  recruiting  command  also 
recast  recruiting  ads.  By  the  late  1970s  they  emphasized  equal  opportunity; 
in  the  early  1980s  ads  portrayed  women  as  members  of  the  team,  with  no 
gender-specific  pitch. 

Congress  ruled  that  the  first  women  would  be  admitted  to  the  US  military 
academies  in  1976,  and  the  Women's  Army  Corps  was  dissolved  in  1978. 
However,  when  the  nation  reinstated  draft  registration  in  1980,  following 
the  Soviet  invasion  of  Afghanistan  in  late  1979,  Congress  excluded  women 
from  registration,  a  decision  that  the  US  Supreme  Court  endorsed  in  1981. 
According  to  the  Supreme  Court,  the  purpose  of  the  draft  was  to  fill  the 
ranks  of  combat  troops,  and  as  women  were  not  allowed  to  join  the  combat 
arms  there  was  thus  no  purpose  in  registering  them  for  the  draft. 

Stabilizing  the  all-volunteer  force 

Many  of  the  arguments  that  swirled  around  the  all-volunteer  army  in  its 
early  days  hinged  on  its  uneasy  relationship  to  the  labor  market.  Was  the 
military  analogous  to  an  employer,  its  members  akin  to  workers?  Or  was 
the  military  exceptional  (because  it  was  responsible  for  the  defense  of  the 
nation),  unbound  by  either  labor  law  or  the  rule  of  the  market?  The  army 
itself  had  helped  to  create  the  ambiguity.  Army  recruiting  advertisements 

33  Binkin  and  Bach,  Women  and  the  Military,  pp.  27-28;  Morden,  The  Women's  Army  Corps, 
pp.  265-269,  285. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


597 


offered  "good,  steady  jobs".  Reformers  within  the  ranks  frequently  compared 
army  privates  to  civilian  employees,  urging  that  the  men  of  the  US  Army 
be  allowed  the  freedom  to  behave  responsibly,  turning  up  on  time  to  their 
jobs  each  morning  just  as  civilian  workers  do.  At  the  same  time,  army 
noncomissioned  officers  and  officers  expected  levels  of  authority  and  obedi- 
ence that  extended  well  beyond  those  demanded  of  civilian  workers,  and 
recruits  were  often  unhappy  that  what  had  been  portrayed  as  a  job  (or  an 
"opportunity")  was,  in  fact,  still  the  army. 

Given  these  challenges  -  of  recruiting  sufficient  numbers,  of  securing 
volunteers  who  could  make  successful  soldiers,  of  managing  a  fundamental 
change  in  the  makeup  of  the  force,  of  dealing  with  the  fact  that  calling 
military  service  a  "good  job"  did  not  negate  the  fact  that  it  was  still  the 
military,  of  dealing  with  international  challenges  -  how  did  the  AVF  persist? 
Why,  given  the  multiple  failures  of  the  fledgling  AVF,  did  the  United  States 
not  return  to  the  draft? 

Largely,  I  would  argue,  this  was  because  there  was  no  political  will  or 
powerful  immediate  threat.  Nothing  is  ever  monocausal,  of  course,  and  it 
is  important  to  acknowledge  the  new  patriotism  of  Reagan's  America  and 
the  waning  shadow  of  the  war  in  Vietnam.  Military  funding  grew  during 
the  1980s,  and  the  army  instituted  internal  reforms,  including  a  new  econo- 
metric, computer-based  system  of  recruiting.  But  market  forces  also  played 
a  role,  both  labor-market  forces  of  supply  and  demand  and  the  cultural- 
consumer  marketplace  of  meaning.  Perhaps  the  most  important  factor 
was  a  change  in  demand.  Congress  lowered  the  target  enlisted  strength 
of  the  army  -  most  dramatically  after  the  Berlin  Wall  fell  in  1989  -  and  as 
the  army  needed  fewer  soldiers,  it  raised  its  standards  for  admission.  Not 
surprisingly,  quality  begat  quality.  Army  rebranding  mattered,  as  well:  this 
version  of  the  army  offered  to  help  American  youth  "Be  All  You  Can  Be". 

Targeted  benefits  were  also  critically  important.  College  benefits  not 
only  drew  more  highly  qualified  recruits;  they  also  helped  to  rebrand  the 
army.  Army  researchers  had  discovered,  in  the  early  1980s,  that  the  biggest 
disincentive  to  enlistment  was  a  potential  volunteer's  mother.  Mothers 
evidently  equated  military  enlistment  with  failure;  success,  to  them,  was 
college  enrollment.  This  research  gave  the  army's  deputy  chief  of  staff 
for  personnel  (DCSPER)  a  brilliant  idea:  link  the  army  to  college;  make 
army  enlistment  the  path  to  college  enrollment;  transform  those  mothers' 
concerns  into  pride.  In  all  fairness,  the  army  advocated  ceaselessly  for 
the  new  GI  Bill  that  was  instituted  in  the  mid-1980s,  and  in  2010  the  army 
spent  $220  million  on  higher-education  assistance  for  active-duty  soldiers. 
But  as  much  as  the  DCSPER  cared  about  the  actual  education  benefits  his 


598 


BETH  BAILEY 


soldiers  might  receive,  he  meant  to  use  the  promise  of  education  to  help 
rebrand  the  army.  And  instead  of  competing  with  colleges  for  young  men 
and  women,  the  military  would  offer  higher  education  as  an  earned  benefit 
of  military  service.34 

During  this  same  period,  the  army  began  a  large  new  program  of  family 
benefits.  The  army  did  not  do  so  to  draw  more  soldiers  with  dependants, 
though  that  was  the  consequence.  Instead,  family  benefits  were  deemed 
necessary  to  retain  soldiers.  This  is  the  logic:  a  conscription-based  force 
relies  on  a  reenlistment  rate  of  about  10  per  cent;  an  AVF,  manpower  analysts 
projected,  would  require  almost  50  per  cent  of  its  personnel  to  reenlist.  And 
researchers,  trying  to  understand  reenlistment  decisions,  discovered  that 
it  most  often  came  down  to  a  single  question:  is  my  family  happy?35 

The  move  to  an  AVF  had  transformed  the  demographics  of  the  army  in 
ways  that  went  beyond  gender  and  race;  the  new  volunteers  were  more  often 
older  (the  current  maximum  age  of  enlistment  is  forty-two;  the  average  age 
is  twenty-one),  more  often  married,  more  often  parents.  But  the  military 
made  little  provision  for  dependants;  "if  the  Army  wanted  you  to  have  a 
family  it  would  have  issued  you  one",  as  the  saying  used  to  go.  Spouses 
(mostly  wives)  and  children  were  often  frustrated  and  unhappy,  and  good 
soldiers  thus  too  often  faced  a  choice:  family  or  career.  The  army's  solution 
was  a  broad  new  program  of  family-oriented  benefits:  excellent  child-care 
programs,  dental  care,  and  excellent  medical  coverage;  recreation  services; 
psychological  counseling;  even  subsidies  for  relocating  family  pets.  Such 
programs  made  the  stark  family-or-military  decisions  ever  less  likely.  But 
they  accelerated  the  transformation  of  army  demographics.  Excellent  fam- 
ily benefits  drew  more  men  and  women  with  families  to  enlist;  excellent 
family  benefits  kept  more  soldiers  with  families  in  the  army.  There  are 
now  1.5  army  dependants  for  every  active  duty  member  of  the  army.  In  2010 
47  per  cent  of  soldiers  had  dependent  children,  72  per  cent  of  them  under 
the  age  of  eleven.36  This  demographic  shift  has  significant  implications  in 
those  instances  when  the  "job"  becomes  deployment  to  a  war  zone,  and 
is  a  significant  piece  of  the  debate  about  labor  markets,  workplaces,  and 
military  exceptionalism. 

34  Alan  Ono,  interview  by  author,  29  July  2005,  Honolulu,  HI. 

35  "Army  Celebrates  25th  Anniversary  of  Army  Family  Action  Plan",  Information  paper, 
12  September  2008,  Army  OneSource,  www.myarmylifetoo.com.  For  statistics,  see  Army  Posture 
Statements,  www.army.mil,  or  the  current  "Army  Profile";  for  the  origins  of  the  program,  see 
John  A.  Wickham,  Jr.,  "White  Paper  1983:  The  Army  Family",  Office  of  the  Army  Chief  of  Staff, 
Washington,  DC,  15  August  1983. 

36  For  statistics,  see  Army  Posture  Statements,  www.army.mil. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


599 


By  the  late  1980s  the  military's  downward  trend  had  been  decidedly 
reversed.  The  army  was  no  longer  in  crisis;  politicians  and  pundits  and 
military  officers  declared  the  all-volunteer  army  a  success.  The  navy  and 
marines  offered  similar  success  stories,  though  neither  had  suffered  quite 
so  much  as  had  the  army  in  the  transition.  (The  air  force  was  largely  exempt 
from  the  problems  the  other  services  faced  in  the  initial  decade  of  the  AVF, 
as  it  remained  quite  competitive  throughout  the  transition.)  After  a  rocky 
beginning,  the  military  had  learned  to  maneuver  successfully  in  the  market 
system.  Nonetheless,  it  is  important  to  acknowledge  that  the  military  was, 
in  fact,  still  protected  from  the  labor-market  laws  of  supply  and  demand.  It 
could  compete  in  the  market  because  it  was  underwritten  by  the  state  -  by 
rising  military  budgets  funded  by  American  taxpayers  and  citizens. 

Despite  the  success  of  the  all-volunteer  force,  tensions  remained  between 
labor  and  military  models.  These  tensions  came  into  stark  conflict  in  2003 
as  the  United  States  went  to  war  in  Iraq.  During  the  1990s,  army  recruit- 
ing had  tried  to  distance  itself  from  war.  When  a  New  York  Times  reporter 
suggested  that  the  army's  success  in  the  Persian  Gulf  War  (1990-1991)  must 
be  great  for  recruiting,  the  Recruiting  Command's  director  of  advertising 
disagreed.  "We  don't  want  to  be  misleading",  he  said,  "but  too  much  combat 
footage  interferes  with  the  long-term  attributes  of  army  service  that  we 
want  to  portray:  money  for  college,  skills  training  and  relevance  to  a  civilian 
career."37 

Of  course,  army  leaders  always  understood  that  the  mission  of  the  US 
Army  is  to  preserve  the  peace,  a  mission  they  understand  first  as  deter- 
ring armed  violence  and  second  as,  when  deemed  necessary  by  civilian 
leaders,  fighting  and  winning  the  nation's  wars.  But  the  all-volunteer  army 
had,  quite  purposely,  played  down  prospects  of  war  and  of  combat.  It  had 
portrayed  itself  as  a  site  of  employment,  as  a  source  of  opportunity.  Young 
men  and  women  who  joined  the  army  in  the  pre-Iraq  War  years  knew,  on 
some  level,  that  the  global  situation  might  change,  that  they  might  well  be 
deployed.  But  some  of  those  who  joined  the  Army  Reserve  on  the  promise 
of  "One  Weekend  a  Month",  or  who  enlisted  in  the  active  ranks  drawn  by 
promises  of  money  for  college  were  understandably  upset  by  what  they  saw 
as  a  bait-and-switch.38 

In  the  early  months  of  the  war  in  Iraq  General  Eric  Shinseki,  chief  of 
staff  of  the  army,  directed  the  Training  and  Doctrine  Command  (TR  ADOC) 
to  define  a  "warrior  ethos".  Driven  in  part  by  the  conditions  of  combat  in 

37  "The  War  in  Military  Ads?  What  War?",  New  York  Times,  8  March  1991,  p.  Di. 

38  Bailey,  America's  Army,  pp.  245,  247. 


600 


BETH  BAILEY 


Iraq  and  the  recent  death  of  eleven  soldiers  and  capture  of  twenty-year-old 
maintenance  clerk  Jessica  Lynch  and  her  five  companions  in  an  attack  on 
their  convoy,  the  TRADOC  task  force  concluded  that  all  soldiers,  no  matter 
what  their  MOS  or  gender,  had  to  be  prepared  for  combat.  The  army  replaced 
the  Soldier's  Creed  that  had  been  adopted  in  the  years  after  the  Vietnam 
War  with  one  that  emphasized  the  Warrior  Ethos.  The  new  creed  replaced 
the  initial  phrase,  "I  am  a  member  of  the  United  States  Army",  with  "I  am  a 
Warrior  and  a  member  of  a  team."  In  the  early  twenty-first  century,  key  army 
leaders  were  attempting  to  counter  the  notion  that  soldiering  was  a  job.39 

Key  variables:  the  all-volunteer  force  in  the  United  States 

The  United  States  traditionally  relied  on  some  form  of  a  volunteer  force, 
turning  to  conscription  only  during  major  wars.  Between  the  end  of  World 
War  II  and  the  Vietnam  War,  the  military  expected  to  fill  its  ranks  largely 
with  volunteers,  drafting  only  enough  additional  men  to  reach  accessions 
goals  for  each  service.  A  relatively  small  percentage  of  those  who  served 
were  draftees  during  these  years,  with  the  exception  of  the  Korean  War. 
In  1949,  for  example,  volunteers  were  sufficient  to  fill  the  ranks;  not  a 
single  man  was  drafted.  Still,  it  is  important  to  distinguish  between  "true" 
volunteers  and  draft-motivated  volunteers,  or  men  who  enlisted  because 
they  expected  to  be  drafted  and  knew  they  would  have  more  control  over 
their  assignments  and  prospects  if,  instead,  they  volunteered  for  service. 
Although  it  is  difficult  to  collect  such  data  with  precision,  army  researchers 
concluded  that  49.7  per  cent  of  volunteers  in  1969,  during  the  Vietnam  War, 
were  draft-motivated.40 

While  individuals  face  no  compulsion  to  join  or  serve  in  the  US  military, 
once  enlisted,  members  of  the  military  are  subject  to  specific  legal  con- 
straints. Most  fundamentally,  enlistment  changes  the  recruit's  status  from 
individual,  able  to  enter  freely  into  contract,  to  servicemember,  bound  by 
the  regulations  of  the  US  military.  In  1890,  in  its  decision  In  re  Grimley,  the 
US  Supreme  Court  ruled  that  "enlistment  is  a  contract,  but  it  is  one  of  those 
contracts  which  changes  the  status,  and  where  that  is  changed,  no  breach 
of  the  contract  destroys  the  new  status  or  relieves  from  the  obligations 
which  its  existence  imposes".  To  clarify,  the  justices  offered  the  analogy 

39  Ibid.,  pp.  248-249. 

40  Griffith,  The  US  Army's  Transition  to  the  All-Volunteer  Force,  p.  53;  Flynn,  The  Draft,  1940-1973, 
pp.  88-113. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


601 


of  marriage.  While  the  "contract  obligations"  of  marriage  include  "mutual 
faithfulness,  [...]  a  breach  of  those  obligations  does  not  destroy  the  status 
or  change  the  relation  of  the  parties  to  each  other".41 

For  example,  in  1978  Captain  Leon  T.  Davis,  a  thirty-year-old  radiologist, 
faced  court-martial  for  desertion  after  he  refused  to  take  his  assignment  in 
Korea.  Captain  Davis  argued  that,  in  a  volunteer  force,  military  service  was 
based  on  a  two-way  contract.  He  had  joined  the  army,  he  testified,  based 
on  promises  made  by  recruiters  and  by  army  advertising,  most  particularly 
the  claim  that  army  doctors  would  have  modern,  state-of-the-art  medical 
equipment.  Because  that  was  untrue  the  army  was  in  breach  of  contract  and 
he  was  thus  "legally  and  morally  excused"  from  filling  his  contractual  obliga- 
tions. Captain  Davis  was  court-martialed,  though  a  $2,000  fine  replaced 
the  potential  sentence  of  eight  and  a  half  years  of  hard  labor.  The  military 
court  decision  was  based  on  In  re  Grimley:  the  contractual  act  of  enlistment 
had  transformed  Leon  Davis  from  an  individual  into  a  soldier  and,  once  his 
status  changed,  no  breach  of  contract  could  destroy  his  new  status  or  relieve 
him  of  the  obligations  it  carried.  That  decision,  obviously,  brings  into  relief 
the  difference  between  military  service  and  civilian  employment.42 

A  second  legal  constraint  on  military  service  as  free  labor  is  the  practice 
of  "stop  loss".  Stop  loss  is  the  involuntary  extension  of  an  individual's  active 
duty  service  beyond  the  specified  initial  term  of  service,  which  may  be 
up  to  the  contractual  end  of  obligated  service  (eight  years).  The  policy, 
which  was  created  by  Congress  after  the  end  of  US  involvement  in  the 
war  in  Vietnam,  is  based  on  Title  10,  United  States  Code,  Section  12305(a): 
"the  President  may  suspend  any  provision  of  law  relating  to  promotion, 
retirement,  or  separation  applicable  to  any  member  of  the  armed  forces 
who  the  President  determines  is  essential  to  the  national  security  of  the 
United  States".43  The  standard  Armed  Forces  enlistment  contract  includes 
the  following  statement:  "In  a  time  of  war,  my  enlistment  may  be  extended 
without  my  consent  for  the  duration  of  the  war  and  for  six  months  after  its 
end  (10  U.S.C.  506, 12103(c))."44  Stop  loss  has  been  used  during  the  wars  in  Iraq 
and  Afghanistan,  primarily  to  extend  when  the  soldier's  unit  is  to  deploy 


41  For  complete  text  of  decision,  seejustia.com. 

42  George  C.  Wilson,  "Verdict  Due  in  Doctor's  Court  Martial",  Washington  Post,  4  November 
1978,  "Army  Lawyer:  Recruiting  Ads  Simply  Puffery",  Washington  Post,  3  November  1978. 

43  For  this  regulation,  see  http://us-code.vlex.com/source/us-code-armed-forces-1009  (accessed 
January  2012). 

44  Enlistment/Reenlistment  contract  available  at  www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/infomgt/ 
forms/eforms/ddooo4.pdf  (accessed  January  2012). 


602 


BETH  BAILEY 


within  ninety  days  of  his  or  her  end  of  initial  enlistment.  According  to  the 
army  58,300  soldiers  were  affected  by  stop  loss  between  2002  and  2008. 45 

Stop  loss  is  invoked  in  unusual  circumstances.  In  most  cases,  individuals 
serve  an  agreed-upon  term.  Duration  of  service  varies,  as  branches  of  the 
armed  forces  offer  different  enlistment  options  at  different  points  in  time 
based  upon  the  recruiting  market  and  the  mix  of  immediate  and  longer- 
term  military  needs.  One  argument  in  favor  of  the  volunteer  force,  which 
typically  requires  longer  periods  of  enlistment  than  those  mandated  by  the 
draft  (ranging  from  twenty-one  to  twenty-four  months  in  the  post-World 
War  II  era),  is  that  longer  periods  of  training  and  experience  are  necessary 
to  master  increasingly  sophisticated  military  technology.  Most  current 
enlistments  in  the  military  are  for  three  or  four  years,  although  those 
who  have  served  are  contractually  obligated  for  eight  years  and  maintain 
"individual  ready  reserve"  status,  in  which  they  have  no  military  obligations 
but  may  be  called  up  during  the  balance  of  that  time,  as  in  the  stop-loss 
policy  described  above. 

Military  pay  in  the  United  States  is  linked  to  civilian  pay.  Until  2006, 
military  pay  raises  were  at  least  0.5  per  cent  higher  than  each  year's  civilian 
pay  raise,  as  calculated  by  the  Employment  Cost  Index  (ECI).  Since  2007, 
military  pay  is  automatically  raised  to  equal  the  ECI  increase,  but  may 
exceed  that  figure  if  so  authorized  by  Congress.  Military  pay  follows  a 
carefully  calibrated  system  of  pay  grades,  based  on  a  combination  of  rank 
and  seniority,  which  are  consistent  across  all  services.  Enlisted  ranks  range 
from  E-i  (private,  airman  basic,  or  seaman  recruit)  through  E-9  (equivalent 
ranks  to  army  sergeant  major  through  sergeant  major  of  the  army);  warrant 
officers,  which  only  exist  in  some  services,  run  W-i  through  W-5;  officer 
ranks  from  O-i  (second  lieutenant/ensign)  through  O-10  (general/admiral). 
In  2011,  pay  for  E-i  was  $1,467.60  per  month.  Members  of  the  US  military 
also  receive  benefits,  including  health  care  for  self  and  dependants,  housing 
allowances  (where  applicable),  clothing  allowance,  family-separation  al- 
lowance, access  to  lower-cost  goods  on  post,  and  various  forms  of  incentive 
and  special  pay,  including  that  for  hazardous  duty. 

The  AVF  is  based  on  free  labor,  although  the  choice  to  enlist  is,  obviously, 
not  made  in  a  vacuum,  and  critics  have,  at  various  times,  charged  that  the 
AVF  replaced  the  selective  service  system  with  an  economic  draft.  Civilian 
designers  of  the  American  all-volunteer  force  intended  for  the  military  to 
compete  in  a  national  labor  market  and  called  frequently  on  principles 
of  free  labor  as  they  discussed  the  shape  of  the  force.  Willing  or  not,  the 

45   Tom  Vanden  Brook,  "DOD  Data:  More  Forced  To  Stay  in  Army",  USA  Today,  23  April  2008. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


603 


military  has  since  designed  recruiting  strategies  for  labor-market  competi- 
tion, although  most  who  shape  such  campaigns  understand  that  more  is 
involved  in  the  decision  to  enlist  than  the  rational  economic  interests  of 
potential  recruits.  While  I  doubt  many  of  those  serving  in  the  US  military 
think  of  his  or  her  service  in  these  terms,  an  all-volunteer  force  would  fall 
on  the  "commodified  labor"  end  of  the  axis. 

Major  factors  contributing  to  the  emergence  and  persistence  of 
the  US  all-volunteer  force 

Many  factors  contributed  to  the  United  States'  decision  to  move  from  a 
conscription-based  to  an  all-volunteer  force.  To  turn  to  cliche,  a  perfect 
storm  of  opposition  to  the  draft  emerged  during  the  late  1960s,  creating 
strange  bedfellows  as  right  and  left  joined  in  opposition  to  the  draft.  Despite 
the  wide  range  of  factors  that  undermined  the  draft,  the  two  most  important 
were  demographic  and  ideological. 

Demographic  change  in  the  US  population  was  perhaps  the  most  impor- 
tant factor  behind  the  move  from  conscription-based  to  all-volunteer  force. 
Between  1964  and  1973,  the  front  end  of  the  baby  boom  came  of  age.  Close  to 
27  million  young  men  entered  the  draft  pool  during  those  years,  the  largest 
cohort  of  men  between  eighteen  and  twenty-five  before  or  since.  Only  2.7 
million  of  them  would  serve  in  Vietnam,  fewer  still  in  combat. 

Over  the  course  of  the  war  in  Vietnam  Americans  came  to  believe  -  ac- 
curately -  that  the  selective  service  system  was  unfair  and  inequitable, 
allowing  those  with  resources  to  escape  its  reach.  Historian  Christian 
Appy  calls  Vietnam  "the  working-class  war",  and  class  undeniably  played 
a  powerful  role  in  predicting  which  young  men  would  be  drafted.  Those 
from  relatively  well-off  families  were  more  often  able  to  find  a  sympathetic 
doctor  who  would  provide  documentation  for  a  medical  exemption.  Higher 
education,  paid  for  by  individual  students  or  their  families  rather  than  by 
the  state,  was  grounds  for  deferment  and,  in  1966,  only  6  per  cent  of  those 
serving  in  Vietnam  had  college  degrees.  (The  percentage  rose  to  10  by  1970, 
with  the  end  of  exemptions  for  graduate  students  and  teachers.)  African 
Americans  were  more  likely  to  be  drafted  than  whites,  more  likely  to  be  put 
into  the  infantry,  and,  in  the  early  years  of  the  war,  disproportionately  likely 
to  die.  Black  Americans  overwhelmingly  believed  that  the  toll  of  the  war 


604 


BETH  BAILEY 


fell  most  heavily  on  their  sons,  even  though  military  policies  had  lowered 
black  casualty  rates  by  the  late  1960s. 46 

The  larger  point,  however,  is  that  there  were  vastly  more  young  men 
than  the  military  required,  even  at  the  height  of  the  Vietnam  War,  and  the 
military  continued  to  rely  on  deferments  to  manage  that  oversupply.  (It 
moved  to  a  lottery  system  with  more  limited  deferments  for  1970  summons.) 
However,  the  deferments  that  had  seemed  relatively  innocuous  during 
times  of  peace  had  much  greater  stakes  in  an  era  when  a  draft  notice  likely 
meant  deployment  to  Vietnam.  As  draft  calls  rose  and  more  and  more  young 
American  men  died  on  foreign  soil,  the  selective  service  system  seemed 
less  and  less  fair. 

Many  Americans  wanted  to  end  the  draft  because  they  believed  the 
United  States'  selective  service  system  was  unfair.  That  belief,  ultimately, 
was  due  to  demographic  factors.  Because  there  were  so  many  more  young 
men  of  draft  age  than  were  required  for  military  service,  most  particularly 
for  combat  in  Vietnam,  risk  and  sacrifice  were,  by  definition,  not  fairly 
shared.  Most  young  men  worried  about  their  draft  status,  but  a  relatively 
small  percentage  of  them  were  conscripted,  and  a  relatively  small  percent- 
age of  those  fought  in  Vietnam.  World  War  II,  in  contrast,  had  disrupted 
the  lives  of  almost  all  the  nation's  citizens,  with  virtually  every  able-bodied 
young  man  serving  in  the  military  or  doing  "essential"  defense  work.  The 
children  of  the  president  of  the  United  States,  along  with  large  numbers  of 
students  from  Harvard,  Yale,  and  Princeton,  served  in  the  military  along 
with  the  sons  of  struggling  hourly  workers  and  middle-class  shopkeepers 
and  small  farmers.  And  throughout  World  War  II,  despite  the  much  greater 
loss  of  life,  Americans  had  confidence  in  the  selective  service  system.  In  1942 
93  per  cent  believed  the  draft  operated  fairly;  in  May  1945  the  system  still  had 
the  confidence  of  79  per  cent.47  That  was  not  true  during  the  Vietnam  War. 

The  demographically  created  inequities  helped  to  discredit  the  US 
selective  service  system,  but  ideological  and  political  objections  were  also 
critical  to  the  creation  of  the  all-volunteer  force.  Proposals  to  replace  the 
draft  with  voluntary  service  came  from  all  parts  of  the  political  spectrum. 
First  of  all,  President  Nixon's  proposal  to  end  the  draft  was  a  calculated 
political  move  intended  to  undermine  antiwar  protest.  Antiwar  movement 
leaders  had  often  mobilized  opposition  to  the  war  by  focusing  on  the  draft, 
and  anger  over  the  draft  did  fuel  antiwar  protest.  Both  Johnson  and  Nixon 
understood  that  some  part  of  the  antiwar  protest  was  so  motivated  (though 

46  Appy,  Working  Class  War,  esp.  pp.  21,  26. 

47  Flynn,  The  Draft,  1940-7973,  p.  121. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


605 


their  focus  on  the  opposition  to  the  draft  led  them  to  underestimate  the 
depth  and  breadth  of  opposition  to  the  war),  and  Nixon  meant  to  undercut 
the  antiwar  movement  by  winnowing  out  some  of  those  who  were  mainly 
concerned  with  the  draft.  The  draft  provided  an  opportunity  for  action. 
Perhaps  antiwar  protest  would  quiet  if  the  draft  were  not  such  an  issue. 

Those  on  the  left  made  two  key  arguments.  Many  to  the  left  of  the  politi- 
cal center  argued  that  it  would  be  more  difficult  for  American  presidents 
to  engage  in  military  adventurism  if  they  could  not  rely  upon  conscription 
but  instead  had  to  convince  young  people  to  voluntarily  put  their  lives 
on  the  line.  Their  reasoning,  though  shown  by  subsequent  events  to  be 
flawed,  has  a  certain  logic.  The  president  would  not  be  able  to  send  troops 
to  war  cavalierly,  knowing  that  the  draft  would  supply  however  many 
bodies  required.  Young  Americans  would  not  volunteer  for  unpopular  or 
illegitimate  wars.  According  to  this  reasoning,  an  all-volunteer  force  would 
be  a  check  on  the  nation's  ability  to  go  to  war. 

Men  and  women  who  believed  that  the  United  States'  war  in  Vietnam  was 
illegitimate  also  questioned  the  legitimacy  of  the  draft.  Why,  they  asked, 
could  the  government  compel  men  to  go  to  war  against  their  will,  to  kill  and 
to  risk  death  in  a  war  that  a  majority  of  their  fellow  citizens  did  not  support? 
Revelations  that  the  US  government  had  lied  to  the  American  people  about 
the  initial  reasons  for  escalation  of  the  war,  US  wartime  actions,  and  the 
war's  progress  lent  strength  to  such  questions  and  helped  to  undermine 
willingness  to  continue  conscription.  Widely  publicized  tales  of  fragging, 
alcohol  and  drug  abuse,  combat  refusal,  wartime  atrocities,  desertion,  and 
other  acts  of  disobedience  by  US  combatants  during  the  war  contributed 
to  popular  antimilitary  sentiment  and  further  undermined  support  for 
compulsory  military  service.  Thus  the  specific  war  mattered  greatly,  giving 
force  to  political  and  ideological  objections  to  the  draft. 

Conservative  opposition  to  the  draft  was  much  less  focused  on  the 
war  in  Vietnam;  conservatives  supported  American  war  policies  much 
longer  than  did  the  liberal-left.  Nonetheless,  policy-oriented  conservatives 
and  libertarians  had  long  been  arguing  for  the  end  of  conscription.  Some 
conservative  proponents  of  an  all-volunteer  force  presented  the  draft  as  a 
"gross  infringement  on  personal  liberty",  while  a  powerful  cohort  of  free- 
market  economists  argued  that  conscription  imposed  a  "hidden  tax"  on 
those  who  were  drafted  -  an  argument  that  goes  back  to  the  demographic. 
Those  who  are  drafted,  according  to  this  argument,  lose  not  only  the  dif- 
ference between  civilian  salaries  and  low  military  pay  during  their  legally 
mandated  service,  but  also  delay  their  further  education,  apprenticeship, 
or  accumulation  of  seniority,  the  benefits  of  which  accrue  over  time.  Those 


606 


BETH  BAILEY 


who  escape  the  draft  -  a  much  larger  portion  of  the  population  and  of  their 
peers  -  are  not  so  penalized.48 

These  free-market  critics  of  the  draft  believed  that  the  military  should 
compete  in  the  national  labor  market  and  insisted  that  recruiting  would  pose 
no  difficulty  if  military  compensation  matched  entry-level  civilian  pay  and 
benefits.  Martin  Anderson,  the  man  who  convinced  Nixon  to  make  his  pledge 
to  end  the  draft,  was  a  junior  player  in  this  world.  Nixon,  in  fact,  used  such 
language  in  his  1968  radio  address:  the  armed  forces,  he  explained,  were  the 
"only  employers  today  who  don't  have  to  compete  in  the  job  market  [...].  They've 
been  able  to  ignore  the  laws  of  supply  and  demand."  Higher  pay  and  increased 
benefits,  Nixon  claimed,  would  make  military  jobs  "more  competitive  with 
the  attractions  of  the  civilian  world"  and  the  all-volunteer  force  a  possibility.49 

Finally,  changes  in  military  technology  and  doctrine  played  a  role. 
Echoing  Eisenhower,  Nixon  told  the  nation  in  1968  that  in  a  nuclear  age 
"huge  ground  armies  operating  in  massive  formations  would  be  terribly 
vulnerable",  and  thus  the  nation  needed  a  smaller  number  of  "motivated 
men"  with  the  "higher  level  of  technical  and  professional  skill"  necessary 
to  operate  the  "complex  weapons  of  modern  war".50  Nixon's  claim  may  have 
been  disingenuous,  but  changes  in  military  technology  and  doctrine  would 
alter  the  way  the  military  defined  desirable  -  and  acceptable  -  recruits. 

Some  of  the  factors  that  led  to  the  end  of  the  draft  and  the  creation  of  the 
AVF  remain  critically  important  to  its  persistence,  while  others  episodically 
threaten  to  undermine  it. 

Demographics  remain  significant.  While  demographic  shifts  -  the  baby 
boom  that  supplied  a  large  excess  of  draft-age  men  -  helped  make  the  move 
to  an  all-volunteer  force  feasible,  demographics  has  worked  against  the  AVF 
in  more  recent  decades.  At  the  height  of  the  baby  boom  in  1957,  the  US  birth- 
rate was  25.3  (per  1,000  population);  by  1973  it  had  fallen  to  14.9.  Of  course 
overall  population  had  increased,  so  the  drop  in  numbers  is  not  so  extreme 
as  the  more  than  40  per  cent  decline  in  birthrate  might  suggest.  Nonetheless, 
births  dropped  from  a  high  of  4,308,000  in  1957  to  3,136,965  in  1973,  or  roughly 
27  per  cent.  Put  in  other  terms,  the  US  fertility  rate  hit  a  twentieth-century 
high  of  3.8  per  cent  in  1957,  declining  to  1.7  per  cent  in  1976.  It  did  not  again 
reach  replacement  rate  (2.0)  until  2007.  The  US  military's  overall  recruitment 
goal  for  1974  was  just  under  428,000.  That  figure  declined  steadily  over  the 

48  For  a  detailed  discussion  of  the  "hidden  tax",  complete  with  primary  documents,  see  Rostker, 
/  Want  You!,  pp.  113-120. 

49  Nixon,  "The  All-Volunteer  Armed  Force",  radio  address. 

50  Ibid. 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


607 


following  years,  especially  rapidly  in  the  post-Cold  War  era.  Recruitment 
targets  for  the  US  military  were  approximately  292,000  in  1989;  they  were 
down  to  200,000  in  1992,  and  only  181,000  in  2004.  Army  recruitment  goals,  in 
parallel,  were  211,600  (1974);  119,875  (1989);  75,000  (1992);  and  77,000  (2004).  (It 
is  important  to  note  that  these  goals  are  only  for  active-duty  enlisted  troops 
and  include  both  nonprior  service  and  re  enlistment.) 51  The  army  obviously 
found  it  much  easier  to  recruit  75,000  volunteers  a  year  than  211,000. 

A  significant  number  of  these  military  volunteers  are  not  US  citizens.  In 
recent  years  the  US  immigration  rate,  both  legal  and  nondocumented,  has 
accounted  for  a  greater  percentage  of  American  population  growth  than 
does  its  birthrate.  As  of  2006, 40,000  noncitizens  served  in  the  US  military, 
with  approximately  8,000  resident  aliens  enlisting  for  active  duty  each 
year.  By  law,  enlistees  must  be  legally  in  the  United  States  and  hold  a  green 
card,  which  is  evidence  that  the  holder  may  be  legally  employed.  President 
George  W.  Bush  signed  an  executive  order  allowing  noncitizens  to  apply 
for  citizenship  following  a  single  day  of  active  service  in  the  US  military, 
and  as  of  2006  25,000  men  and  women  have  applied  for  and  been  granted 
US  citizenship  through  military  service.52  The  "Dream  Act",  a  bipartisan 
congressional  effort  targeted  at  the  approximately  65,000  young  people 
without  legal  status  in  the  United  States  who  graduate  from  American 
high  schools  each  year,  would  offer  a  six-year  path  to  citizenship  based 
on  earning  a  college  diploma  or  serving  for  four  years  in  the  US  military. 

While  the  military  requires  a  relatively  small  percentage  of  draft-age 
youth,  military  enlistment  standards  combine  with  labor-market  pressures 
to  create  ongoing  struggles  to  fill  the  ranks.  In  the  contemporary  United 
States,  the  military  is  definitely  not  an  employer  of  last  resort.  Seven  out  of 
ten  young  Americans  do  not  meet  the  standards  for  military  enlistment.  Of 
the  31.2  million  Americans  between  the  ages  of  seventeen  and  twenty-four, 
only  4.7  million  are  considered  "qualified  military  available",  and  only  1.6 
million  are  in  the  army's  target  market:  young  men  and  women  between 
the  ages  of  seventeen  and  twenty-four,  with  earned  high  school  degrees,  in 
good  physical  condition,  capable  of  scoring  in  the  top  half  of  the  military 
qualification  exam,  and  without  criminal  records.53 

51  "Total  Enlisted  Accessions  to  Active  Duty",  in  "Numeric  Goals  and  Achievement",  www. 
defenselink.mil/prhome/mpprecruiting.html  (accessed  15  March  2005). 

52  Prepared  Statement  of  David  S.  C.  Chu,  Undersecretary  of  Defense  (Personnel  and  Readiness), 
for  testimony  before  the  Senate  Armed  Services  Committee,  109th  Congress,  2nd  sess.,  10  July  2006; 
armed-services.senate.gov/statemnt/2006/July/Chu%2007-10-06.pdf  (accessed  January  2012). 

53  For  an  overview  of  ineligibility,  see  William  H.  McMichael,  "Most  US  Youth  Unfit  to  Serve, 
Data  Show",  Army  Times,  3  November  2009. 


608 


BETH  BAILEY 


The  US  military  competes  with  colleges  and  universities  and  with  civilian 
employers  for  the  more  able  of  American  youth.  As  of  October  2009, 70.1  per 
cent  of  those  who  graduated  from  high  school  in  spring  2009  were  attending 
college  or  university.54  While  a  great  many  young  people  do  not  graduate 
from  high  school,  they  fall  outside  the  military  recruitment  target  market. 
In  2007,  for  example,  despite  recruiting  pressures  during  two  unpopular 
wars,  only  1.4  per  cent  of  enlisted  recruits  had  not  graduated  from  high 
school  or  earned  a  GED.  That  contrasts  with  20.8  per  cent  of  all  Americans 
aged  eighteen  to  twenty-four.55 

Other  criteria  rule  out  a  great  number  of  potential  volunteers.  At  the  end 
of  the  first  decade  of  the  twenty-first  century,  approximately  17  per  cent  of 
Americans  in  the  target  age  group  are  significantly  overweight  or  obese. 
Significant  numbers  used  prescription  drugs  that  disqualified  them  from 
service.  And  until  2011,  although  gay  men  and  women  who  volunteered 
for  military  service  were  not  prohibited  from  joining  or  questioned  about 
sexual  orientation  upon  enlistment,  they  were  not  allowed  to  serve  openly 
and  risked  discharge  upon  discovery.  Approximately  13,000  men  and  women 
were  discharged  from  the  military  under  the  provisions  of  "Don't  Ask,  Don't 
Tell"  between  1994  and  2011.56  Thus,  the  reduction  of  total  end  strength  has 
made  it  possible  to  fill  the  ranks  despite  the  shrinking  pool  of  eighteen-  to 
twenty-four-year-olds,  but  high  admissions  criteria  make  that  task  more 
challenging  than  numbers  alone  would  suggest. 

One  of  the  predicted  drawbacks  of  a  volunteer  force  was  its  cost,  and 
the  high  costs  of  recruiting  and  maintaining  an  all-volunteer  force  work 
against  its  persistence.  The  AVF  is  enormously  expensive.  Obviously  much 
of  the  US  military  budget  is  driven  by  high-cost  weapons  systems,  the  global 
presence  of  the  US  military,  and  the  US  wars  in  Iraq  and  Afghanistan.  But 
the  labor-market  military  has  added  extraordinary  new  costs.  According  to 
the  Congressional  Budget  Office,  basic  pay  for  lower-ranked  enlisted  troops 

54  US  Bureau  of  Labor  Statistics,  "College  Enrollment  and  Work  Activity  of  2009  High  School 
Graduates",  USDL-10-0533,  27  April  2010,  http://www/bls/gov/news.release/hsgec.nro.htm 
(accessed  20  February  2011). 

55  Shanea  Watkins  and  James  Sherk,  The  Heritage  Foundation,  "Who  Serves  in  the  US  Military? 
The  Demographics  of  Enlisted  Troops  and  Officers,"  21  August  2008,  (http://www.heritage.org/ 
Research?NationalSecurity/cdao8-05.cfm  (accessed  16  September  2008);  McMichael,  "Most  US 
Youth  Unfit  to  Serve".  According  to  the  US  Bureau  of  Labor  Statistics  ("Occupational  Outlook 
Handbook,  2010-11  Edition:  Job  Opportunities  in  the  Armed  Forces",  http://www.bls.gov/oco/ 
ocos249.htm  (accessed  20  February  2011)),  92  per  cent  of  American  enlisted  troops  had  earned 
high  school  diplomas  in  2008,  a  figure  that  rises  to  98.5  per  cent  if  GEDs  are  included. 

56  Ed  O'Keefe,  "Fight  for  Gays  in  the  Military  Isn't  Ending  Any  Time  Soon",  Washington  Post, 
10  February  2011;  McMichaels,  "Most  US  Youth  Unfit  to  Serve". 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


609 


doubled  between  1971  (two  years  before  the  AVF  began)  and  1975  (two  years 
after  it  began),  when  adjusted  for  inflation.  The  US  General  Accounting 
Office  estimated  that  the  AVF  added  approximately  $3  billion  a  year  to  the 
military's  1974  budget  (more  than  $10  billion  in  2006  dollars).  Those  who 
argued  that  the  draft  imposed  a  hidden  tax  on  draftees  see  that  figure  as 
evidence  of  the  scale  of  the  tax  imposed.  Others  make  the  point  that  this 
is  not  necessarily  a  cost  of  an  all-volunteer  force,  as  draftees  shouldbe  paid 
at  reasonably  competitive  civilian  rates.57 

Not  only  does  labor-market  competition  require  higher  salaries  and 
significant  nonpay  benefits,  initial  costs  of  recruiting  have  risen  steadily 
over  the  decades.  Estimates  vary  depending  on  what  categories  are  included, 
but  it  is  safe  to  say  that  the  army  currently  spends  close  to  $25,000  to  recruit 
each  nonprior  service  volunteer.  Through  most  of  the  war  in  Iraq  it  took 
7,500  recruiters  and  a  budget  of  millions  of  dollars  each  year  to  convince 
about  80,000  nonprior  service  volunteers  to  join  the  army.  The  army  offered 
large  bonuses:  its  budget  for  fiscal  year  2011  included  $465  million  as  bonuses 
for  new  recruits.58  An  NPS  recruit  could  qualify  for  a  "quick  ship"  bonus  of 
$20,000  by  reporting  for  duty  within  thirty  days  of  enlisting,  and  those 
qualifying  for  high-demand  MOSs  got  up  to  $40,000  for  a  four-year  enlist- 
ment. Reenlistment  bonuses  were  also  common,  and  with  private  security 
contractors  offering  to  pay  up  to  $200,000  a  year  for  the  best  former  special 
operations  troops,  the  army  (very  rarely)  offered  reenlistment  bonuses  of  up 
to  $150,000.  These  financial  incentives  were  combined  with  college  educa- 
tion benefits  and  student-loan  repayment  programs.59  The  family  benefits 
that  were  developed  both  to  encourage  reenlistment  and  in  recognition 
of  the  changing  demographics  of  the  army  are  also  extraordinarily  costly. 
The  US  military  counts  about  1.4  million  on  active  duty,  but  its  military 
health  system  covers  9.6  million  people,  the  majority  of  them  dependants 
of  both  active-duty  and  retired  veterans.  Pentagon  spending  on  health 
care  has  risen  from  $19  billion  in  2001  to  a  projected  $50.7  billion  in  2011, 
in  part  because  of  wartime  casualties,  but  also  because  the  military  plan 
is  more  generous  than  any  potential  civilian  coverage.  In  addition,  family 


57  Congressional  Budget  Office,  "The  All-Volunteer  Military:  Issues  and  Performance",  July 
2007,  www.cbo.gov/doc.  cfm?index=83i3&type=o&sequence=i  (accessed  10  January  2011). 

58  Jim  Tice,  "2011  Budget:  Funds  for  Pay  Hike,  Bonuses,  Surge",  Army  Times,  15  February  2010, 
www.armytimes.com/news/2010/02/army_budget_021510w/  (accessed  10 January  2011). 

59  Phillip  Carter  and  Brad  Flora,  "I  Want  You  .  .  .  Badly:  A  Complete  Guide  to  Uncle  Sam's 
Recruiting  Incentives",  Slate  (online),  7  November  2007. 


610 


BETH  BAILEY 


support  programs  cost  $8.3  billion  a  year  -  which  includes  childcare  spaces 
for  200, 000. 60 

Economics  certainly  plays  a  role  in  enlistment  rates,  and  thus  in  the 
continuation  of  an  AVF.  The  recession  that  began  in  2009  led  to  a  flood  of 
enlistments,  including  more  and  more  young  people  who  have  completed 
college.  But  the  AVF  is  not  an  economic  draft,  in  that  those  who  come  from  the 
poorest,  most  disadvantaged  backgrounds  are  much  less  likely  to  qualify  for 
enlistment:  they  are  less  likely  to  have  graduated  from  high  school,  more  likely 
to  have  gotten  in  trouble  with  the  law,  more  likely  to  have  physical  ailments, 
from  obesity  to  asthma,  and  more  likely  to  have  gone  to  inferior  schools  and 
thus  more  likely  to  score  below  the  cut-off  on  military  entrance  exams.  The 
American  military  is  solidly  middle-class,  if  middle-class  is  defined  by  the 
nation's  median  household  income,  which  was  $50,428  in  2007.  At  the  same 
time,  military  recruiting  focuses  heavily  on  small  towns  and  rural  areas  in 
which  capable  young  people  find  few  employment  opportunities,  and  it  is 
clear  that  volunteer  rates  predictably  climb  with  unemployment  rates.61 

Finally  and  most  fundamentally,  war  has  a  profound  impact  on  the  health 
and  persistence  of  the  all-volunteer  force,  whether  in  the  form  of  military 
doctrine  and  war  planning  or  as  wars  actually  fought.  "War",  however,  is  not 
a  generic  category;  the  specific  circumstances  of  each  war  or  conflict  are 
critically  important.  The  Vietnam  War  made  the  move  to  an  AVF  possible, 
largely  by  creating  discontent  with  the  selective  service  system  and  fostering 
antimilitary  sentiments.  But  the  antimilitary  sentiments  aroused  by  the  war 
in  Vietnam  also  made  it  difficult  to  recruit  quality  soldiers  and  forge  a  suc- 
cessful volunteer  force  in  that  war's  aftermath.  The  US  military's  performance 
in  the  1990-1991  Persian  Gulf  War,  despite  some  problems  with  mobilization, 
convinced  many  skeptics  that  the  AVF  was  a  capable  force  and  quieted  the 
calls  for  a  return  to  the  draft  that  had  begun  almost  before  conscription 
ended.  During  the  1990s,  the  US  military  was  frequently  deployed  in  MOOTW 
(Military  Operations  Other  Than  War),  including  disaster  relief  and  nation- 
building  or  stabilizing  efforts.  Such  efforts  continue  in  Iraq  and  Afghanistan, 
and  female  personnel  are  increasingly  important  in  interactions  with  women 
in  sex-segregated  societies.  New  technologies  that  require  experience  and 
maturity  more  than  youthful  physical  vigor  extend  the  potential  age  of 
service,  an  important  consideration  in  a  nation  with  an  aging  population. 

60  Greg  Zaroya,  "Military's  Health  Care  Costs  Booming",  USA  Today,  25  April  2010;  United 
States  Department  of  Defense,  Fiscal  Year  2012  Budget  Request,  Overview,  February  2011,  pdf 
at  http://comptroller.defense.gov/budget.html  (accessed  January  2011). 

61  Watkins  and  Sherk,  "Who  Serves  in  the  US  Military?" 


SOLDIERING  AS  WORK 


611 


When  the  United  States  began  its  preemptive  war  in  Iraq  in  2003,  few 
discussed  a  draft.  This  was  in  part  because  the  Bush  administration  pre- 
sented the  invasion  of  Iraq  as  a  brief  and  easily  accomplished  task,  but  also 
because  most  Americans  had  forgotten  that  the  AVF  was  envisioned  as  a 
peacetime  core  around  which  a  wartime  military  could  be  constructed. 
Even  as  servicemen  and  -women  were  returned  for  second,  third,  and  fourth 
tours  of  Iraq  and  were  compelled  to  remain  in  the  military  past  the  end  of 
their  enlistments  by  stop-loss  provisions,  few  military  or  political  leaders 
seriously  contemplated  returning  to  the  draft. 

Conclusion 

There  was  from  its  beginning  a  tension  at  the  heart  of  the  all-volunteer 
army.  The  end  of  conscription  did  not  change  the  army's  purpose:  the 
fundamental  mission  of  the  US  Army  is  to  fight  and  win  the  nation's  wars. 
But  the  all-volunteer  army  had,  quite  purposefully  and  more  powerfully 
over  time,  tried  to  recast  the  meaning  of  military  service.  It  downplayed 
notions  of  duty  and  service  and  obligation;  it  sold  itself  to  potential  recruits 
and  to  the  broader  American  public  both  as  a  source  of  opportunity  and  as 
a  "good  job".  And  while  a  great  many  men  and  women  did  find  opportunity 
and  stable  employment  in  the  army  during  the  decades  of  relative  peace, 
peace  was  never  guaranteed. 

Was  it  legitimate,  critics  periodically  asked,  to  sell  the  army  as  money 
for  college  or  as  job  training  or  as  a  source  of  health  coverage  for  one's 
children  when  those  erstwhile  students  or  skilled  employees  or  parents 
would  also  be  soldiers,  subject  to  orders  that  override  other  obligations  and 
other  roles,  and  that  might  well  end  their  lives?  Back  in  1978,  as  the  false 
promises  of  some  army  recruiters  made  news  and  drew  the  attention  of 
Congress,  recruiters  were  ordered  to  give  all  applicants  a  written  reminder. 
"The  Army  is  a  military  organization",  the  statement  read,  "which  may  be 
called  upon  to  participate  in  combat  operations  (to  fight)  while  you  are  a 
member  of  it."62  One  can  understand  the  bitterness  of  members  of  the  Army 
Reserve,  which  had  relied  for  years  on  the  recruiting  slogan,  "One  Weekend 
a  Month",  who  in  2003  embellished  their  Army  Reserve  truck  in  Iraq  with 
a  sign:  "One  Weekend  a  Month,  My  Ass!" 


62  "Recruiting  Scandals:  Symptom  of  Trouble  for  Volunteer  Forces",  US  News  and  World  Report, 
16  October  1978,  p.  44. 


612 


BETH  BAILEY 


What  does  it  mean  that  the  vast  majority  of  Americans  remained  untouched 
by  war,  not  even  subject  to  the  shared  risk  of  the  draft  or  the  obligation  of 
service,  while  a  small  volunteer  force  was  sent  repeatedly  to  war  during  the 
first  decade  of  the  twenty-first  century?  This  is  the  ultimate  but  rarely  stated 
problem  with  an  all-volunteer  force:  the  AVF  cushions  most  Americans  from 
the  impact  of  war.  By  replacing  the  logic  of  citizen's  obligation  with  that  of 
the  market  and  defining  soldiering  as  employment,  it  excuses  citizens  from 
their  basic  obligation  to  pay  attention  to  what  is  done  in  their  name  and  of 
acting,  as  citizens,  whether  to  support  or  to  prevent  US  military  actions. 

The  solution  might  be  obvious  -  a  return  to  the  draft  -  but  that  proposal 
runs  up  against  hard  evidence  and  firm  belief.  US  military  leaders  are 
certain  that  a  volunteer  force  offers  the  best  means  of  national  defense,  at 
least  as  they  envision  current  and  future  conflicts.  It  takes  a  fair  amount 
of  intellectual  competence  to  be  a  soldier  in  today's  army  -  or  to  serve  in 
any  branch  of  the  military  -  and  it  takes  a  great  deal  of  training.  While  a 
no-deferments  draft  would  definitely  capture  more  of  the  most  compe- 
tent American  youth,  it  would  also  capture  a  great  many  more  of  the  less 
competent.  And  drafting  young  men  and  women,  as  a  matter  of  course,  for 
more  than  a  year's  term  would  be  hard  to  justify.  But  a  one-year  stint  in  the 
army  does  not  offer  time  for  adequate  training  on  increasingly  sophisticated 
weapons,  nor  does  it  allow  a  new  soldier  time  to  develop  the  necessary 
experience  and  instincts  to  function  in  complex  and  rapidly  changing 
operational  environments.  In  addition,  as  the  army  learned  all  too  well 
in  the  last  years  of  conscription,  those  who  are  drafted  against  their  will 
tend  to  be  much  less  highly  motivated  than  those  who  have  volunteered. 

Two  other  problems  further  complicate  the  notion.  Reinstituting  the 
draft  would  create  a  political  storm  over  women's  roles.  Currently,  women 
may  enlist  in  the  military  but  are  not  required  to  register  for  the  draft.  That 
policy  would  certainly  be  challenged  -  and  few  politicians  want  to  contend 
with  that  struggle.  The  demographic  issue  remains,  as  well:  the  military 
needs  but  a  fraction  of  the  nation's  youth,  and  a  draft  that  took  a  small 
percentage  of  young  men  (or  young  men  and  women)  would,  certainly,  be 
intensely  unfair.  Bottom  line:  less-able,  less-well-trained,  less-experienced, 
less-motivated  soldiers  are  more  likely  to  fail  in  their  missions.  And  they 
are  more  likely  to  get  themselves  -  and  their  comrades  -  killed.  While  the 
army  had  enormous  reservations  about  the  move  to  an  all-volunteer  force 
back  in  the  early  1970s,  it  more  strongly  opposes  the  return  to  the  draft 
today.  Thus,  despite  the  various  factors  that  work  against  the  persistence 
of  the  all-volunteer  force,  short  of  massive,  total  war,  the  United  States  will 
almost  certainly  maintain  an  all-volunteer  force. 


Private  contractors  in  war  from  the 
1990s  to  the  present 

A  review  essay1 
S.  Yelda  Kaya 

The  single  most  important  change  in  military  affairs  in  recent  history  is 
the  unprecedented  role  private  contractors  have  come  to  play  in  modern 
warfare.  This  has  been  a  trend  in  the  making  from  the  1990s  on.  Quite  a 
number  of  things  have  changed  since  then,  though,  and  this  is  not  just  about 
sheer  numbers.  Equally  important  is  the  fact  that  today  the  biggest  clients 
of  private  military  services  are  the  world's  richest,  most  advanced  states. 
So  employment  of  contractors  in  combat  is  no  longer  about  "state  failure" 
as  it  was  in  the  1990s  when  African  states  lacking  any  sort  of  internal  props 
or  any  means  of  substantial  control  over  their  territories  hired  mercenary 
forces  to  fight  insurgents. 

The  use  of  contractors  in  war  can  be  considered  as  the  privatization  of 
(certain)  military  functions.  This  is  why  the  phenomenon  is  usually  taken 
to  challenge  what  is  the  most  basic  feature  of  the  modern  state  for  many: 
the  monopoly  of  the  legitimate  use  of  violence.  Most  scholars  recognize  that 
this  monopoly  has  never  been  complete  and  that  modern  states  have  indeed 
delegated  the  use  of  force  to  private  agents  in  this  way  or  some  other.  Some 
argue,  for  instance,  that  the  history  of  military  contracting  in  the  United 
States  dates  back  to  the  Civil  War.  Nonetheless,  it  is  crucial  to  see  that  what 
we  have  been  witnessing  for  the  last  two  decades  is  a  break  from  the  past. 
There  has  been  a  dramatic  change  in  the  magnitude  of  military  contracting: 

In  Vietnam,  for  every  one  hundred  soldiers  one  contractor  was 
employed.  During  the  Gulf  War  (1991),  one  contractor  was  on  the 
battlefield  for  every  fifty  soldiers.  During  Operation  Iraqi  Freedom, 

1  The  following  books  are  reviewed  in  this  chapter:  Deborah  D.  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force: 
The  Consequences  of  Privatizing  Security  (New  York,  2005);  James  Jay  Carafano,  Private  Sector, 
Public  Wars:  Contractors  in  Combat  -  Afghanistan,  Iraq,  and  Future  Conflicts  (Westport,  CT, 
2008);  Simon  Chesterman  and  Chia  Lehnardt  (eds),  From  Mercenaries  to  Market:  The  Rise  and 
Regulation  of  Private  Military  Companies  (New  York,  2007);  Jeremy  Scahill,  Blackwater:  The 
Rise  of  the  World's  Most  Powerful  Mercenary  Army  (New  York,  2008);  andP.W.  Singer,  Corporate 
Warriors:  The  Rise  of  the  Privatized  Military  Industry  (2003,  2nd  revised  edn,  New  York,  2008). 


614 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


contractors  made  up  one  out  of  every  ten  personnel.  Only  six  years 
later,  one  contractor  supported  government  operations  in  Iraq  for 
about  every  1.5  soldiers.2 

Private  contractors  are  now  heavily  employed  in  Afghanistan  and  Iraq. 
They  are  training  local  security  forces  (army  and  police),  providing  logistics 
support  for  the  US  military,  escorting  convoys,  securing  headquarters,  and 
guarding  top-level  officials. 

In  what  follows,  I  will  review  five  of  the  most  prominent  studies  on 
private  contractors,  which  will  hopefully  help  us  reach  an  understanding  of 
the  current  state  of  the  field.  The  books  are  introduced  briefly  below,  which 
is  followed  by  five  sections  organized  around  some  basic  questions,  namely: 
what  are  the  reasons  for  the  move  toward  much  greater  participation  of 
private  actors  in  warfare?  Is  it  proper  to  call  contractors  "mercenaries"? 
What  do  contractors  do  in  warfare  and  how  can  firms  be  classified?  Who  are 
the  people  employed  by  contractor  firms  on  the  battlefield  and  what  kind 
of  "work"  do  they  do?  Is  there  a  limit  to  privatization  of  military  functions 
in  the  sense  that  certain  tasks  are  seen  as  inherently  governmental  and 
thus  ill  suited  for  delegation  to  the  private  sector? 

Peter  Singer's  Corporate  Warriors  is  the  first  major  study  on  the  subject. 
The  book  appeared  before  the  invasion  of  Iraq,  in  2003,  and  as  a  result,  it  is 
not  about  private  military  activities  in  Iraq  -  or  even  Afghanistan.  The  cases 
Singer  examines  are  mainly  from  the  1990s.  Corporate  Warriors  centers 
the  discussion  on  three  cases.  First  there  is  the  now  defunct  Executive 
Outcomes,  formed  in  1989,  whose  combat  operations  in  Africa  brought 
forth  a  concern  about  private  military  firms  for  the  first  time.  Military 
Professional  Resources  Incorporated  (MPRI)  is  the  second  case.  Founded 
in  1987  by  senior  military  officers,  MPRI  is  one  of  USA's  favorite  military 
companies,  especially  in  advisory  and  training-related  missions.  The  final 
case  is  Brown  &  Root  Services,  which  has  been  awarded  many  back-end 
support  contracts  by  the  US  government  in  contingency  operations  from 
1990s  onward.  The  updated  edition  of  2008  of  Corporate  Warriors,  on  the 
other  hand,  involves  a  postscript  on  Iraq,  in  which  Singer  notes  that  the 
situation  in  Iraq  reinforces  the  arguments  he  initially  formulated.  Some 
people  would  disagree  with  the  statement;  nevertheless  Corporate  Warriors 
is  a  study  everyone  working  in  the  field  engages  with  in  some  way.  Especially 
notable  is  the  typology  of  privatized  military  firms  Singer  proposes,  the 

2  Carafano,  Private  Sector,  Public  Wars,  p.  38.  According  to  Jeremy  Scahill,  the  ratio  is  already 
one-to-one  (Blackwater,  p.  460). 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


615 


"tip-of-the-spear"  model,  which  disaggregates  firms  on  the  basis  of  their 
relative  proximity  to  the  tactical  battlefield.  Tip-of-the-spear  typology  has 
received  many  criticisms,  and  almost  everyone  has  put  forward  alternative 
typologies  in  response  to  Singer's;  nonetheless,  it  may  well  be  argued  that 
his  compares  favorably  with  the  rest. 

Deborah  Avant's  Market  for  Force  overlaps  in  significant  ways  with 
Corporate  Warriors.  This  is  not  only  because  the  cases  examined  are  more 
or  less  the  same.  It  is  also  that  the  two  analysts  share  common  concerns 
regarding  the  privatization  of  military  functions,  which  basically  relate  to 
the  twin  problems  of  unaccountability  and  loss  of  democratic  control  over 
the  use  of  force.  On  the  other  hand,  the  scope  of Market for Force  is  narrower: 
it  is  confined  to  the  consequences  of  outsourcing  military  functions.  Avant 
is  particularly  interested  in  the  ways  in  which  privatization  has  had  an 
impact  on  the  control  of  violence.  Avant  introduces  the  triple  concepts  of 
functional,  political,  and  social  control  of  force.  Functional  control  is  about 
the  "ability  to  deploy  coercion  effectively  to  defend  the  state's  interests" 
(p.  40).  The  concern  here  is  with  getting  the  job  done  with  minimum  cost. 
Political  control  refers  to  the  political  processes  by  which  decisions  regard- 
ing employment  of  force  are  made.  The  issue  Avant  focuses  upon  is  whether 
privatization  erodes  existing  procedures  of  decision  making  and  changes 
the  balance  of  power  between  (old  and  new)  institutional  actors.  Finally, 
social  control  pertains  to  the  containment  of  force  within  acceptable  norms 
stemming  from  human  rights,  international  law,  democracy,  etc.  Avant 
inquires  whether  privatization  reinforces  or  attenuates  the  integration  of 
coercive  institutions  with  these  norms.  Avant  includes  two  intervening 
variables  in  her  analysis,  the  first  one  being  the  character  of  the  state  which 
outsources.  There  is  a  single  distinction  here:  strong  versus  weak  states. 
The  second  variable  has  to  do  with  the  questions  as  to  which  functions 
are  privatized  and  in  what  ways.  Then  the  author  explores  the  ways  in 
which  the  variable  of  state  strength  interacts  with  that  of  the  nature  of  the 
military  function  to  produce  varying  patterns  of  change.  Finally,  we  should 
also  note  that  Market  for  Force  is  valuable  in  particular  in  scrutinizing 
cases  of  privatization  where  the  client  is  not  a  government  but  instead  a 
nongovernmental  organization  or  a  multinational  corporation.  Many  NGOs 
and  MNCs  working  in  troubled  zones,  so  to  speak,  either  hire  contractors  to 
secure  their  headquarters/facilities  or  simply  finance  the  services  contrac- 
tors provide  for  the  host  governments.  The  prominent  example  of  this  sort 
of  privatization  is  Nigeria,  where  Shell  and  Chevron  have  financed  (and 
deployed)  public  security  forces  in  the  face  of  a  popular  movement  against 
oil  operations. 


616 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


Then  there  is  From  Mercenaries  to  Market.  This  edited  volume  has  two 
major  concerns.  The  first  major  is  with  identifying  the  new  private  actors 
engaged  in  military  activities.  In  a  nutshell,  contributors  define  contractors 
as  distinct  from  mercenaries.  The  other  concern  has  to  do  with  the  regula- 
tion of  private  military  activities.  The  bulk  of  the  book  is  actually  devoted 
to  the  second  topic,  regulation  -  quite  understandably  because  it  is  a  major 
challenge  to  come  up  with  procedures  according  to  which  contractors 
will  be  prosecuted  and  punished  for  wrongful  deeds.  This  constitutes  a 
problem  because,  on  the  one  hand,  private  contractors  are  not  part  of  the 
military  chain  of  command  and  they  fall  outside  the  military  code  of  justice. 
Therefore,  unlike  the  US  soldiers  they  accompany,  American  contractors 
working  for  the  US  government  in  Iraq  cannot  be  court-martialed.3  Another 
dimension  to  this  problem  is  that  international  law  is  directed  toward 
national  militaries;  and  private  actors  seem  to  be  lying  outside  its  jurisdic- 
tion. There  is  also  the  fact  that  Order  17  issued  by  the  Coalition  Provisional 
Authority  bestowed  upon  foreign  contractors  immunity  against  prosecution 
under  Iraqi  law;  contractors  cannot  be  taken  to  Iraqi  courts  because  of 
crimes  they  commit  on  Iraqi  soil.  All  these  combine  to  make  regulation  a 
burning  issue.  Contributors  to  From  Mercenaries  to  Market  consider  many 
different  scenarios  ranging  from  voluntary  self-regulation  to  regulation  by 
states  (that  is,  states,  like  the  USA  or  the  UK,  which  export  private  military 
services).4  The  problem  of  regulation  is  not  critical  for  my  purposes,  but 
the  problem  of  identification  is,  and  I  am  going  to  examine  it  in  the  pages 
to  come.5 


3  It  is  true  that  there  has  been  a  recent  change  in  the  Uniform  Code  of  Military  Justice. 
According  to  the  code,  civilian  contractors  fall  under  military  justice  only  in  times  of  declared 
wars,  which  is  very  much  a  rarity.  The  application  of  the  code  was  extended  in  2007:  now 
contractors  can  also  be  prosecuted  for  misconduct  during  contingency  operations.  The  impact 
of  the  amendment  is  yet  to  be  observed. 

4  The  most  interesting  contribution  in  this  respect  is  Chia  Lehnardt's  "Private  Military 
Companies  and  State  Responsibility",  which  argues  that  it  is  wrong  to  write  off  international 
law  as  irrelevant.  This  is  because,  although  international  law  is  biased  toward  states,  it  is  still 
possible  to  make  use  of  it  through  attributing  the  misconduct  of  private  companies  back  to 
hiring  states. 

5  The  following  contributions  will  be  referred  to  in  the  paper:  David  Isenberg,  "A  Government 
in  Search  of  Cover:  Private  Military  Companies  in  Iraq",  pp.  82-93;  Elke  Krahmann,  "Transitional 
States  in  Search  of  Support:  Private  Military  Companies  and  Security  Sector  Reform",  pp.  94-112; 
Chia  Lehnardt,  "Private  Military  Companies  and  State  Responsibility",  pp.  139-157;  Kevin  A. 
O'Brien,  "What  Should  and  What  Should  Not  Be  Regulated?"  pp.  29-48;  Angela  Mclntyre  and 
Taya  Weiss,  "Weak  Governments  in  Search  of  Strength:  Africa's  Experience  of  Mercenaries  and 
Private  Military  Companies",  pp.  67-81;  and  Sarah  Percy,  "Morality  and  Regulation",  pp.  11-28. 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


617 


James  Jay  Carafano's  Private  Sector,  Public  Wars  stands  out  in  its  polemical 
style.  A  retired  army  lieutenant  colonel,  historian,  and  columnist,  Carafano 
argues  that  the  public-private  balance  in  military  affairs  has  changed  for 
good.  This  is  most  certainly  not  something  to  be  lamented.  It  is  simply 
that  an  unimpeded  free  market  can  "provide  services  faster,  cheaper,  and 
more  effectively"  than  any  government;  military  services  are  no  exception 
(p.  37).  For  Carafano,  private  military  industry  has  the  potential  to  be  one 
of  the  United  States'  "greatest  competitive  advantages  in  the  twenty-first 
century"  (p.  12).  Carafano  has  devoted  many  pages  to  responding  to  crit- 
ics. At  times  his  account  runs  the  risk  of  belittling  the  problems  (such  as 
contractor  accountability  before  the  law;  employee  misconduct;  contractual 
problems  such  as  overcharging)  associated  with  privatization  of  military 
functions;  more  often,  though,  the  conviction  is  that  those  problems  are 
not  inherent  to  outsourcing,  which  means  that  they  may  well  be  corrected. 
The  US  government  up  to  now  has  been  a  "pretty  lousy  customer",  unable  to 
properly  select  or  manage  contractors  (p.  12).  The  key  to  alleviating  problems 
is  "good  governance"  (p.  37).  Good  governance  involves  institutionalized 
mechanisms  of  criticism  and  oversight,  by  which  he  means  judicial  and 
legislative  checks  on  the  executive  branch  on  the  one  hand,  and  media  and 
interest  groups  on  the  other  (pp.  37-38).  The  book  is  not  all  about  vindication 
of  military  outsourcing,  however.  It  also  includes  the  most  detailed  narrative 
of  the  history  of  military  contracting  in  the  United  States  prior  to  the  1990s, 
focusing  chiefly  on  relevant  regulations  and  procedures  of  contracting. 
On  the  other  hand,  while  private  military  activities  in  Iraq  are  reasonably 
documented,  Afghanistan  is  conspicuously  absent;  and  unfortunately  the 
same  is  true  for  the  rest  of  the  studies  under  consideration  here. 

Jeremy  Scahill's  Blackwater  is  an  in-depth  journalistic  analysis  of  the 
"leading  mercenary  company  of  the  US  occupation"  (p.  13).  It  is  only  in 
Scahill's  book  that  military  contractors  are  identified  as  "mercenaries".  It 
goes  without  saying  that  he  is  also  the  harshest  critic  of  the  entire  phenom- 
enon of  military  contracting.  Scahill  not  only  provides  us  with  a  thorough 
account  of  Blackwater's  five-year  work  in  postinvasion  Iraq,  which  is  replete 
with  many  deadly  incidents;  he  at  the  same  time  locates  the  firm  within 
American  politics  and  the  neoconservative  network  in  particular.  Moreover, 
his  book  has  to  be  credited  for  touching  upon  certain  issues  which  are  noted 
only  in  passing  by  the  other,  scholarly  studies.  One  such  issue  concerns  the 
people  employed  by  military  firms.  Dozens  of  questions  pose  themselves, 
including:  who  are  these  people?  Why  do  they  risk  their  lives  working  in 
Iraq?  How  much  do  they  make?  How  do  they  find  employment  in  Iraq?  Is 
this  like  any  other  employment?  Can  they  quit  if  they  want  to?  Scahill's 


618 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


book  sheds  some  light  on  such  questions.  Scahill  presents  a  glimpse  of  the 
prime  contractor/subcontractors  nexus  too.  When  rewarded  government 
contracts,  many  big  companies  split  the  job,  and  contract  parts  of  it  to 
smaller/more  specialized  companies,  which  is  an  important  facet  of  the 
whole  business  of  outsourcing.  Finally,  one  can  also  discover  in  the  book 
some  clues  as  to  the  self-image  of  a  mercenary  company,  through  studying 
the  speeches  and  congressional  testimonies  of  the  intriguing  Eric  Prince, 
Blackwater's  sole  owner. 

Reasons  for  change 

Detailed  treatments  of  reasons  underlying  the  rise  of  private  military 
companies  are  to  be  found  in  Corporate  Warriors  and  The  Market  for  Force. 
For  both  Singer  and  Avant,  the  question  is  one  of  explaining  the  origins  of 
a  market,  which,  by  definition,  is  constituted  by  supply  and  demand.  The 
reasoning  is  simple:  there  should  have  been  some  marked  changes  in  both 
supply  and  demand  so  that  a  previously  nonexistent  market  was  brought  to 
being  in  the  1990s.  Singer  and  Avant  concur  on  the  idea  that  the  end  of  Cold 
War  was  of  crucial  importance,  because  it  eventually  created  a  demand  for 
and  supply  of  private  military  services. 

There  arose  a  demand  for  private  military  services,  first  of  all,  because 
western  militaries  (those  of  former  eastern  bloc  states  included)  were 
significantly  downsized  following  the  fall  of  the  Berlin  Wall;  they,  however, 
were  not  reorganized  to  compensate  for  their  much  smaller  size,  so  much 
so  that,  when  new  security  challenges  emerged,  it  turned  out  that  state 
militaries  were  unable  to  effectively  respond  with  their  own  resources.6  The 
rest  of  the  world  too  witnessed  an  upsurge  in  demand  for  private  military 
services,  for  the  end  of  a  bipolar  world  also  meant  that  "developing"  states 
no  longer  had  superpower  patronage,  or  military  aid,  to  rely  on.7  Bipolariza- 
tion  had  in  fact  entailed  stability  for  such  states,  as  internal  and  external 
conflicts  had  been  kept  in  check  by  superpowers.8  And  when  old  conflicts 
did  resurface  in  areas  which  used  to  be  sites  of  Cold  War  confrontation, 
superpowers  were  now  reluctant  to  intervene  as  these  hot  spots  ceased  to 


6  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force,  pp.  30-31, 146;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  53. 

7  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force,  pp.  36, 159;  Chesterman  and  Lehnardt,  From  Mercenaries  to 
Market,  p.  1;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  pp.  50-51,  55. 

8  Isenberg,  "A  Government  in  Search  of  Cover",  p.  82;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  50. 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


619 


have  any  "strategic"  importance.9  The  "developing"  countries,  with  their 
shallow  political  institutions  and  feeble  armies,  had  no  choice  but  find  new 
forms  of  military  aid. 

As  for  the  supply  side,  downsizing  freed  a  great  many  number  of 
qualified  military  personnel,  who  in  turn  made  up  a  vast  labor  pool  for 
military  companies  to  draw  upon.10  Even  ex-KGB  agents  were  out  there  in 
the  market  looking  for  new  employment  venues,  not  to  mention  special 
operations  personnel  from  all  over  the  world.  Especially  noticeable  were 
South  Africans,  who  came  to  the  market  place  in  hordes  when  the  mas- 
sive repressive  apparatus  of  the  apartheid  regime  was  dismantled.11  Thus 
there  were  plenty  of  men  to  be  hired  by  private  companies;  and  some  of 
whom  actually  became  entrepreneurs  themselves  founding,  most  notably, 
Executive  Outcomes.12  The  end  of  the  Cold  War  facilitated  the  emergence 
of  private  military  companies  in  yet  another  way.  When  the  Warsaw  Pact 
was  dissolved,  weaponry  from  its  member  states  flooded  the  market,  creat- 
ing a  mass  inventory  which  could  be  readily  bought  and  used  by  private 
actors.13  When  Germany  was  reunified,  for  example,  each  and  every  item 
in  East  Germany's  arms  stock  was  auctioned  and  sold  at  bargain  prices.14 
The  market  was  thus  saturated  by  every  sort  of  weaponry  making  it  cheaper 
for  companies  to  stage  their  operations.  Executive  Outcomes,  for  instance, 
employed  Soviet  weapons  in  its  African  operations.15  Because  soldiers  and 
arms  were  in  abundance,  it  was  relatively  easy  to  start  a  business  in  this 
nascent  industry. 

To  conclude,  analysts  agree  that  downsizing  was  the  initial  spurt  behind 
the  beginnings  of  privatization  of  military  functions.  Downsizing  has  had 
long-term  consequences,  and  its  impact  is  still  being  felt  today.  Nonetheless, 
there  also  are  other  factors  that  can  be  said  to  have  reinforced  the  impact 
of  downsizing.  One  such  factor  might  be  gathered  from  Avant's  analysis. 
For  Avant,  a  key  element  paving  the  way  for  the  employment  of  military 
companies  has  been  the  emergence  of  "global  security  concerns",  which 
have  to  with  novel  phenomena  such  as  international  terrorism,  interna- 

9  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  58. 

10  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force,  p.  30;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  pp.  49-50,  53. 

11  Avant,  The  Marketfor  Force,  p.  138;  Chesterman  and  Lehnardt,  From  Mercenaries  to  Market, 
p.v. 

12  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  53. 

13  Chesterman  and  Lehnardt,  From  Mercenaries  to  Market,  p.  v;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors, 
PP-  53-54, 166-167. 

14  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  54. 

15  Ibid.,  p.  106. 


620 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


tionally  operating  drug  cartels,  and  so  forth  (pp.  32-34).  The  problem  is 
that  nation-states'  security  organs  cannot  successfully  deal  with  these 
new  sources  of  insecurity  in  today's  "globalized"  world  as  there  is  a  "scale 
mismatch".  Avant  is  nonetheless  cautious  to  add  that  the  rise  of  global 
security  concerns  cannot  be  said  to  have  necessitated  privatization.  After 
all,  multilateral  institutions  should  be  well  suited  to  meet  these  new  security 
challenges.  However,  the  UN  and  the  NATO  have  proven  to  be  ineffective 
in  dealing  with  security  problems  of  that  sort  because  they  cannot  act 
unless  a  political  agreement  is  reached  among  member  states  (pp.  34-38). 
Employing  private  contractors  is  simply  the  easier  option. 

The  US  war  on  global  terrorism  in  the  aftermath  of  the  11  September 
attacks  alone  goes  a  long  way  in  explaining  the  newly  emerged  reliance 
on  private  contractors  in  warfare.  In  Afghanistan  and  Iraq  there  has  been 
an  unparalleled  boom  in  contracting  spreading  to  virtually  every  kind 
of  military  function  from  force  training  to  personal  security  of  senior  of- 
ficials. As  mentioned  before,  Afghanistan  does  not  figure  often  in  the  books 
reviewed,  but  there  are  some  explanations  offered  regarding  the  reasons 
why  private  contractors  have  been  indispensable  for  Iraqi  operations.  The 
most  obvious  explanation  is  that  US  regular  forces  were  already  heavily 
employed  in  Afghanistan.  Secondly,  the  United  States  initiated  its  Iraqi 
operation  with  insufficient  forces,  which  was  partly  due  to  miscalculation, 
as  the  administration  underestimated  the  number  of  troops  that  would 
be  required  once  the  invasion  was  over.16  Yet  this  was  not  solely  about  a 
failure  of  military  planning,  because  sending  more  troops  would  at  the 
same  time  be  a  politically  undesirable  move  in  that  it  would  disturb  the 
American  public.17  Thirdly,  the  Iraqi  operation  was  virtually  unilateral,  thus 
lacking  significant  allied  support  to  rely  on,  which  turned  private  contrac- 
tors themselves  into  an  allied  force  .l8  Also  absent  were  UN  peacekeeping 
forces,  which  had  been  present  in  the  Balkans,  for  example.19  Finally,  Scahill 
notes  that  the  decision  to  dissolve  the  Iraqi  military  (as  well  as  the  police 
and  internal  security  services)  as  part  of  the  process  of  "de-Baathification" 
had  played  a  part  too,  not  only  because  it  engendered  a  massive  security  gap 
but  also  because  out-of-work  soldiers  and  other  security  personnel  joined 
the  resistance  forces,  making  the  situation  in  Iraq  even  worse  (pp.  129, 


16  Isenberg,  "A  Government  in  Search  of  Cover",  p.  83;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  pp.  243-245. 

17  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  244. 

18  Scahill,  Blackwater,  pp.  46,  60;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  pp.  244,  247. 

19  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force,  p.  239;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  244. 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


621 


182-183,  227).  All  these  combined  to  make  contractors  the  largest  partner 
of  the  US  military  in  Iraq. 

Afghan  and  Iraqi  operations  aside,  it  is  also  the  case  that  the  advent  of 
the  global  war  on  terror  is  enhancing  the  strategic  importance  of  parts  of 
the  world,  such  as  Central  Asia  and  the  Caucasus.  Because  these  areas  are 
now  crucial  to  the  US  fight  against  terrorism,  they  are  designated  sites  for 
security  sector  reform,  where  private  military  companies  are  contracted 
to  provide  force  training.20  This  is  best  exemplified  by  the  interest  in  the 
Caspian  Sea  region.  According  to  Scahill,  rich  oil  and  natural  gas  reserves 
and,  more  importantly,  its  close  proximity  to  Iran  explain  the  strategic 
salience  of  the  region,  where  Blackwater  and  Cubic  have  been  hired  to 
train  local  security  forces.21  The  interest  in  the  region  is  linked  to  the  war 
on  terror,  writes  Scahill,  because  the  US  administration  is  in  a  search  for 
"operating  sites"  to  be  utilized  in  case  there  is  an  attack  against  Iran.22 

If  it  were  thirty  years  ago,  US  soldiers  in  uniform  would  be  training,  say, 
Azerbaijani  or  Georgian  forces  -  this  says  a  lot  about  the  pace  of  downsiz- 
ing in  military  subfields.  That  is,  in  the  United  States,  for  example,  the 
Clinton  government  urged  the  military  to  focus  on  "core  tasks",  i.e.  combat 
functions;  remaining  functions  were  to  be  outsourced  to  private  firms.23 
As  noted  above,  downsizing  hit  a  heavy  blow  at  back-end  support  units, 
which  explains  why  firms  specializing  in  logistics  blossomed  so  rapidly. 
Also  affected  were  training  facilities  and  programs.  In  particular,  succes- 
sive Base  Realignment  and  Closure  (BRAC)  Acts  deprived  the  military 
of  many  training  venues.24  This  is  actually  the  backdrop  to  Blackwater's 
entry  the  industry  in  1998:  the  firm  began  to  operate  a  training  facility, 
which  in  fact  was  little  more  than  a  shooting  range,  in  Camden  County, 
Missouri.25  Similarly,  the  MPRI's  sprout  on  home  soil  owes  much  to  US 
military's  outsourcing  of  education  and  training  programs,  most  notably 
the  Army  Reserve  Officer  Training  Corps  programs.26  MPRI  and  other  US 
firms  working  in  what  Singer  calls  the  consultant  sector  have  grown  rapidly 
since  then,  providing  training  services  all  over  the  world. 

Not  everyone  is  satisfied  with  the  downsizing  argument,  though.  For 
Carafano  (p.  43),  the  downsizing  argument  is  no  more  than  a  myth.  That  is, 

20  Krahmann,  "Transitional  States  in  Search  of  Support",  p.  99. 

21  Scahill,  Blackwater,  pp.  231-243. 

22  Ibid.,  pp.  237, 239. 

23  Krahmann,  "Transitional  States  in  Search  of  Support",  pp.  99, 111. 

24  Scahill,  Blackwater,  p.  93. 

25  Ibid.,  pp.  96-100. 

26  Avant,  The  Marketfor Force,  pp.  116-120. 


622 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


it  is  erroneous  to  associate  the  reliance  of  US  military  on  private  contractors 
with  downsizing.  His  argument  is  that  the  US  military  became  "hollow"  long 
before  the  end  of  the  Cold  War  and  the  consequent  process  of  downsizing: 
the  military  was  underfunded  from  the  end  of  the  Vietnam  War.  Hence, 
in  the  years  following  the  war,  personnel  and  equipment  were  in  short 
supply  with  no  widespread  programs  of  modernization  or  training.  On  the 
other  hand,  Carafano  does  not  propose  a  solely  negative  explanation  of  the 
increasing  reliance  on  contractors.  There  is  also  a  positive  explanation, 
namely  the  US  military's  contentment  with  its  experiment  with  outsourcing 
of  construction  works  during  the  Vietnam  War.  For  the  Pentagon,  he  writes, 
the  employment  of  contractors  was  a  "big  success".  So,  Carafano  holds  that 
privatization  would  have  continued  anyway  -  even  without  the  advent 
of  downsizing  following  the  end  of  the  Cold  War.  And  this  corresponds 
to  a  major  change  in  warfare  in  terms  of  the  balance  between  public  and 
private  forces. 

In  Carafano 's  account  the  dominant  motive  behind  military  outsourcing 
in  the  United  States  is  fiscal.  There  has  been,  for  three  decades  now,  a  huge 
strain  on  federal  budget  owing  to  the  ever  mounting  federal  debt,  which 
necessitates  cost-saving  when  it  comes  to  defense  spending  (pp.  53, 75).  So 
the  government  had  to  cut  back  on  military  spending  (through  outsourc- 
ing) and  this  is  actually  what  has  been  going  on  since  the  early  days  of 
the  Clinton  administration.  It  needs  to  be  stated  that,  for  Carafano,  the 
strain  on  the  budget  had  not  been  caused  by  military  spending  in  the  first 
place.  On  the  contrary,  at  the  root  of  the  fiscal  problem  is  in  fact  mandatory 
government  spending  on  entitlement  programs  such  as  Social  Security, 
Medicare,  and  Medicaid,  which  now  account  for  about  half  of  the  federal 
budget  (pp.  55, 129).  In  other  words,  entitlement  spending  is  booming  at 
the  expense  of  military  spending;  and  this  does  not  appear  to  be  an  easily 
reversible  tendency  unless,  of  course,  entitlement  programs  are  stringently 
reformed:  the  United  States  has  to  spend  less  on  defense  if  it  is  to  continue 
pouring  tax  money  into  health  care  and  other  social  benefits.  The  reform 
of  entitlement  spending  in  this  way  turns  out  to  be  the  gist  of  the  matter 
from  the  author's  neoconservative  point  of  view. 

Needless  to  say,  the  idea  here  in  this  argument  is  that  governments  can 
save  if  they  privatize  some  of  the  functions  that  have  been  traditionally 
performed  by  national  militaries  (p.  43).  Carafano  writes  that  the  primary 
reason  why  militaries  are  more  expensive  relates  to  "upward-spiraling 
manpower  costs"  (p.  56).  Soldiers  are  expensive  not  because  they  have 
high  base  salaries  but  because  in  addition  they  receive  numerous  in-kind 
benefits  for  themselves  and  their  families  (pp.  54, 100, 195).  The  value  of 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


623 


benefits  a  soldier  and  his/her  family  are  entitled  to  is  almost  as  high  as 
the  base  salary  itself,  which  means  that  we  need  to  multiply  the  salary 
by  two  to  get  the  total  value  of  military  compensation  (p.  100).  This  is  not 
the  case  with  civilian  compensation  because  a  private  contractor  does  not 
receive  benefits,  s/he  has  to  pay  for  insurance  and  pay  tax  (whereas  soldiers 
who  are  abroad  on  combat  missions  enjoy  tax  exemptions)  (pp.  99-100).  To 
conclude,  although  it  is  true  that  a  contractor's  pay  is  usually  much  higher 
than  a  soldier's,  the  contractor  is  nevertheless  cheaper. 

Moreover,  as  Carafano  points  out,  militaries  and  private  companies  are 
organized  in  dissimilar  ways,  as  a  result  of  which  they  require  different 
numbers  of  employees  to  get  the  same  job  done  (p.  96).  That  is,  private  units 
are  organized  on  an  ad  hoc  basis,  which  means  that  they  are  "scaled  precisely 
to  the  task  order  in  the  contract".  For  instance,  Carafano  calculates  that 
the  army  would  have  to  deploy  48,000  soldiers  to  perform  the  exact  same 
security  work  that  Blackwater  is  doing  in  Iraq  with  just  1,000  employees. 

Nonetheless,  it  needs  to  be  questioned  whether  the  governments  save 
money  by  contracting  in  every  instance.  Many  observers  are  disturbed  by 
the  fact  that  most  contracts  are  rewarded  with  little  or  no  competition;  this 
is  the  case  with  sole-source  ("no-bid")  contracts.  According  to  Singer,  for 
instance,  the  practice  of  sole-source  contracts  neutralizes  the  "cost-saving 
advantages  of  competition"  (pp.  235-236).  Still,  given  the  necessity  to  urgently 
support  US  operations  in  Iraq  and  Afghanistan,  Carafano  asserts  that  it  is 
perfectly  acceptable  to  limit  competition  in  the  awarding  of  contacts:  the 
normal  procedures  simply  take  too  long  (p.  81).  He  also  adds  that  the  practice  of 
sole-source  is  not  as  common  as  the  critics  would  have  us  believe;  and  neither 
is  it  confined  to  military  contracting  (pp.  78-79).  Then  there  is  the  problem  of 
cost-plus  contracting.  In  this  type  of  contract,  the  client  guarantees  to  pay  for 
the  costs  that  company  incurs  during  the  mission  and,  what  is  more,  there  is 
also  an  incentive  fee  measured  in  profit  percentage  (Singer,  2008: 140).  So  in 
a  cost-plus  contract,  the  more  the  company  spends,  the  more  it  profits,  which 
induces  contractors  to  exaggerate  their  costs.  Hence  there  is  a  major  problem 
of  overcharging.27  Carafano,  again,  defends  the  practice.  For  him,  it  is  wrong 
to  conclude  in  advance  that  contractors  working  in  Iraq  are  overcharging  the 
government,  because  the  cost  of  security  has  indeed  dramatically  risen  due  to 
escalating  insurgency  in  the  country  (p.  82).  So  companies  are  not  pocketing 
immense  profits;  they  are  just  passing  the  rising  costs  onto  the  US  government. 

It  certainly  may  be  the  case  that  the  actual  practice  of  military  contract- 
ing failed  to  deliver  its  promise,  that  is,  better  services  at  a  lower  overall  cost. 


27   Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  pp.  155-157,  248,  252. 


624 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


Nonetheless,  this  would  not  change  the  fact  that  efficiency  concerns  played  a 
considerable  part  in  orienting  governments  toward  outsourcing.  This  is  best 
explained  with  reference  to  the  appeal  of  the  general  idea  of  privatization, 
which  has  spilled  over  into  every  field  from  health  care  to,  eventually,  war.28 

For  Carafano,  there  is  a  further  reason  why  reliance  on  contractors  is 
almost  unavoidable  in  the  US  context:  despite  the  shortage  of  military 
personnel  and  plummeting  defense  spending,  reinstatement  of  the  draft  is 
very  improbable  (pp.  56, 171-172).  The  draft,  which  was  in  effect  between  1940 
and  1973,  was  an  exception  in  the  US  history  -  and  an  exception  dictated  by 
successive,  large-scale  wars.  Policymakers  saw  conscription  as  the  cheapest 
way  of  raising  troops,  which  implies  that  the  worth  of  conscription  was 
instrumental;  raising  an  army  of  citizens  was  never  an  end  in  itself  (pp.  56, 
171).  The  United  States'  three-decade  long  draft  was  politically  palatable 
because  it  was  conceived  as  just,  since  "virtually  everybody  who  could  serve 
had  to  serve"  (p.  56).  Today,  the  size  of  the  military  and  the  draft-age  popula- 
tion have  changed  such  that,  if  the  draft  were  to  be  reintroduced  today,  only 
a  fraction  of  all  eligible  men  would  have  to  be  conscripted  (pp.  56, 171-172). 
Hence  a  draft  today  would  be  unjust  and  "socially  divisive"  (p.  56). 

In  any  case,  Carafano  writes,  conscription  is  at  odds  with  the  US  volunta- 
rist  tradition,  which  has  historically  derived  from  the  "anti-standing  army 
ideology"  (p.  6).  In  Anglo-American  political  tradition,  a  large  standing  army 
bears  a  tremendous  risk,  namely,  it  can  be  turned  into  an  instrument  of 
despotism  and  tyranny  and,  as  such,  it  can  overwhelm  individual  liberties 
(pp.  29,  31-32).  Consequently,  "peacetime  conscription"  is  associated  with 
"militarism  and  authoritarianism"  in  American  political  culture  (p.  32). 
Accordingly,  the  convention  has  been  one  of  keeping  the  standing  army  as 
small  as  possible  without,  of  course,  jeopardizing  security  (pp.  31-32).  When 
the  need  arises,  the  military  is  to  be  supplemented,  preferably  by  volunteers, 
and  only  subsequently  by  conscripts  if  it  is  absolutely  necessary,  as  it  was 
during  the  Civil  War  and  World  War  II  (pp.  29,  32,  56). 

The  whole  story  about  military  companies  rising  to  prominence  should 
not  be  only  about  economics  and  politics.  In  addition,  the  way  wars  are 
fought  has  certainly  changed,  which  brings  up  the  following  question:  are 
military  companies  somehow  better  adapted  than  national  militaries  to 
the  reality  of  warfare  in  the  twenty-first  century?  Unfortunately,  none  of 
the  studies  examined  here  dwells  much  on  the  relation  between  change  in 
the  technology  of  war  and  the  rise  of  military  companies.  There  are  some 

28  Chesterman  and  Lehnardt,  From  Mercenaries  to  Market,  p.  1;  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force, 
p.  35;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  pp.  66-69. 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


625 


scattered  remarks,  but  they  do  not  add  up  to  a  definitive  answer.  Take 
Avant's  The  Market  for  Force,  in  which  this  theme  is  taken  up  twice.  She 
mentions  the  growing  "technological  sophistication  of  weapon  systems" 
and  writes  that  "more  and  more  contractors  have  been  hired  to  work  with 
troops  to  maintain  and  support  these  systems"  (p.  19).  Then  she  cites  a 
couple  of  examples,  which,  however,  fall  short  of  giving  a  comprehensive 
picture  as  to  the  relative  weight  of  this  factor  for  the  transition  to  privatized 
wars.  Then,  elsewhere  in  the  book,  she  holds  that  there  have  been  changes 
in  the  nature  of  conflicts  and  that  as  a  result  certain  previously  nones- 
sential tasks  now  occupy  the  forefront  of  security;  the  examples  she  gives 
are,  again,  the  operation  of  sophisticated  weapons  systems  and  "policing", 
which  are  among  the  services  that  private  companies  commonly  offer 
(p.  3).  Similarly,  Singer  notes  that  technological  sophistication  has  brought 
about  a  "revolution  in  military  affairs",  which  "reinforce  [s]  private  firms' 
critical  importance  to  high-level  military  functions"  as  states  are  unable 
to  supply  such  high-tech  services  from  within  (p.  231).  The  essence  of  the 
revolution  in  military  affairs  is  the  integration  of  information  technologies 
to  warfare  (pp.  62-63).  What  is  so  revolutionary  about  "information  warfare" 
is  that  small,  decentralized,  nonstate  units  are  better  suited  to  taking  full 
advantage  of  new  technologies,  which  renders  militaries  more  and  more 
reliant  on  private  service  providers  (p.  63).  It  is  not  a  stretch  to  take  Singer's 
reflections  to  mean  that  we  might  be  heading  toward  a  new  era  in  which 
states/regular  militaries  will  no  longer  be  "the  most  effective  organizations 
for  waging  warfare"  for  the  first  time  in  modern  history  (p.  61). 

Before  concluding  this  discussion  of  the  reasons  for  change,  we  should 
lastly  take  a  look  at  Avant's  reflections  on  political  control  of  force  and 
how  it  is  affected  by  privatization,  which  is  the  most  intriguing  part  of 
The  Market  for  Force.  One  of  the  cases  she  discusses  here  is  the  United 
States,  which  is  an  instance  of  a  "strong  state"  that  outsources  many  diverse 
military  functions.  The  emphasis,  though,  is  placed  on  the  deployment  of 
contractors  in  Iraq  and  how  that  alters  the  political  process.  Her  account 
culminates  in  a  number  of  conclusions:  (1)  privatization  strengthens  the 
executive  as  opposed  to  the  legislature;  (2)  privatization  impairs  account- 
ability and  brings  about  less  transparency;  and  (3)  new  actors  get  involved 
in  the  decision  making  process  as  a  result  of  the  privatization  drive  (pp.  62, 
68,  82, 128-130, 145,  258-259).29 

29  It  seems  that  these  three  trends  are  most  clearly  observed  in  the  case  of  the  training  of 
foreign  militaries  by  private  companies.  In  such  cases,  a  military  company  has  a  foreign  govern- 
ment as  its  client.  Although  this  is  a  purely  "private"  matter  in  being  a  transaction  between  the 


626 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


Especially  the  first  two  conclusions  might  be  shown  to  be  relevant  to 
the  discussion  of  the  reasons  for  change,  if  we  turn  Avant's  theory  upside 
down.  To  clarify,  what  Avant  delineates  as  consequences  of  privatization 
can  be  reconceptualized  as  functional  benefits  to  be  gained  from  military 
contracting.  In  other  words,  the  advantage  of  employing  private  military 
companies  instead  of  regular  military  is  that  it  is  possible  for  the  executive 
branch  of  government  to  evade  congressional  oversight  and  public  account- 
ability to  a  degree  impossible  within  normal  procedures  of  decision  making. 
This  is  a  heaven-sent  opportunity  for  executives  specifically  when  domestic 
support  for  operations  is  lacking.  At  times  Avant  too  seems  to  opt  for  such 
an  explanation.  To  demonstrate,  she  writes  that 

The  use  of  PSCs  [private  security  companies]  is  often  regarded  as  a 
lower  political  commitment  that  reduces  the  need  to  mobilize  public 

supplier  and  the  client,  the  US  licensing  system  requires  that  this  transaction  be  approved  by 
the  government  in  the  first  place  (Avant,  The  Market  for  Force,  pp.  149-150).  In  other  words,  US 
military  companies  cannot  sell  their  services  to  clients  abroad  unless  the  government  ascertains 
that  the  deal  is  in  accordance  with  US  national  interests.  The  whole  point  about  the  redistribu- 
tion of  power  among  the  branches  of  government  is  that  the  final  decision  about  outsourcing 
and  licensing  is  made  by  the  executive  and  there  is  little  congressional  oversight  (p.  128).  In 
fact,  Congress  is  not  even  informed  about  most  contracts,  since  a  congressional  notification 
is  needed  only  when  the  contract  in  question  exceeds  the  $50  million  mark  (p.  151).  However, 
Avant  notes  that  this  is  far  from  an  insurmountable  obstacle  if  the  executive  is  determined  to 
override  the  legislature:  when  a  contract  is  for  more  than  $50  million,  it  is  possible  to  partition 
it  into  several  smaller  contracts  to  avoid  congressional  scrutiny  (p.  151). 

This  is  how  privatization  of  military  functions  disadvantages  the  legislature  vis-a-vis  the 
executive,  resulting  in  a  less  transparent  process  of  decision  making,  which  in  turn  entails 
dwindling  accountability.  As  for  Avant's  third  conclusion,  the  one  about  the  actors  who  have 
come  to  possess  preponderance  in  decision  making,  the  most  striking  development  is  the 
emergence  of  military  companies  themselves  as  hefty  players.  Military  companies  are  not 
merely  usually  the  sole  source  of  information  that  the  executive  has  to  rely  on  when  deciding 
upon  the  technicalities  of  force  deployment  (p.  62);  at  the  same  time  they  endeavor  to  influence 
policymaking  via  lobbying  -  and  they  definitely  constitute  an  important  interest  group  that 
government  are  bound  to  reckon  with.  MPRI's  lobbying  to  get  its  contract  with  the  government  of 
Equatorial  Guinea  licensed  is  a  case  in  point  perfectly  illustrating  the  clout  of  military  companies 
as  interest  groups  (pp.  154-155).  When  MPRI  applied  for  a  license  to  train  the  Equatorial  Guinean 
military  for  the  first  time,  it  was  turned  down  by  US  government  on  account  of  country's  poor 
human  rights  record.  But  the  company  did  not  give  up  and  carried  out  a  successful  campaign  to 
convince  the  decision  makers  that  rapprochement  with  Equatorial  Guinea  was  in  the  govern- 
ment's best  interest  because,  its  dismal  human  rights  record  notwithstanding,  the  country  had 
oil  reserves  the  United  States  should  take  advantage  of.  Apparently  these  arguments  resonated 
well,  as  the  MPRI  lobbying  paid  off;  the  contract  with  Equatorial  Guinea  was  approved,  albeit 
with  an  almost  two-year  delay.  The  fact  remains  though:  a  private  company  proved  capable  of 
affecting  US  foreign  policy  objectives. 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


627 


support  for  foreign  engagement  activities.  Indeed,  congressional  lead- 
ers and  the  public  appear  to  be  less  aware,  interested,  and  concerned 
about  sending  PSCs  than  sending  US  forces.  The  use  of  PSCs  [...]  makes 
decisions  to  use  [...]  force  abroad  less  visible  and  less  transparent. 
It  thus  enhances  the  authority  of  individual  decision  makers  in  the 
executive  branch  and  reduces  the  processes  of  inter-agency  coopera- 
tion and  institutional  wrangling.30 

Therefore,  there  could  be  a  political  cost-saving  logic  behind  the  deploy- 
ment of  contractors.  This  could  also  be  what  Singer  has  in  mind  when  in 
the  postscript  to  Corporate  Warriors  he  draws  attention  to  "the  irony  that 
for  all  the  focus  on  contractors  as  a  private  solution,  the  cost  savings  were 
political  in  nature".31  And  it  is  certainly  Scahill's  contention,  who  writes  that 
mercenaries  are  necessary  tools  for  "offensive,  unpopular  wars  of  conquest".32 
This  is  also  about  conduct  of  foreign  policy,  of  course.  On  the  basis  of 
compelling  evidence,  Avant  (along  with  some  other  analysts)33  contends  that 
privatization  of  this  sort  furnishes  the  government  with  a  new  and  much 
more  "flexible"  foreign  policy  tool.  It  is  a  flexible  tool  not  only  because  it 
avoids  Congress,  it  also  has  the  advantage  of  deflecting  criticism  from  the 
international  community.  MPRI's  training  of  Croatian  forces  during  the 
Balkan  conflict,  which  is  cited  by  almost  every  one  working  in  the  field,  is 
the  paradigmatic  example.  The  MPRI  contract  came  when  there  was  a  UN 
arms  embargo  on  Yugoslavian  successor  communities  (pp.  101, 113).  Hence 
it  was  impossible  for  any  law-abiding  government  to  provide  military  as- 
sistance in  the  form  of  training  programs  to  any  of  the  forces.  There  is  some 
disagreement  as  to  how  the  deal  between  MPRI  and  the  Croats  was  struck, 
but  there  seems  to  be  grounds  to  assume  that  it  was  the  US  government 
which  advised  the  Croats  to  seek  help  from  MPRI  (p.  104,  n.  120).  The  reason 
for  this  intervention  is  that  the  United  States  saw  it  in  its  interest  to  support 
(a  coalition  of)  Croats  and  Bosnians  against  the  Serbs  (p.  104).  Yet,  in  the 
face  of  the  arms  embargo,  the  government  could  not  do  this  directly  by, 
for  instance,  sending  US  forces  to  train  the  Croats  or  Bosnians.  MPRI  was 
the  stand-in  in  this  awkward  situation.  The  MPRI  training  program  was 
called  the  "Democracy  Transition  Program"  and  it  was,  on  paper  at  least, 
designed  to  democratize  and  reorganize  the  Croatian  military  to  bring  it 

30  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force,  p.  133. 

31  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  245. 

32  Scahill,  Btackwater,  p.  463. 

33  E.g.  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  pp.  125-133;  Avant,  The  Marketfor Force,  pp.  144, 152-154. 


628 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


nearer  to  NATO  standards  (p.  102).  On  the  other  hand,  the  rumor  is  that 
MPRI  was  not  just  training  but  at  the  same  time  helping  the  Croats  plan  an 
offensive  attack  on  the  Serbs  (p.  103).  As  would  be  expected,  MPRI  denies 
this;  nonetheless,  many  observers  agree  that  it  probably  was  MPRI  which 
planned  the  attack  (p.  103).  In  any  case,  the  MPRI  training  program  turned 
out  to  be  a  success;  the  ensuing  Operation  Storm  by  Croatian  forces  was  an 
immense  victory  against  the  Serbians  and  a  turning  point  in  the  making 
of  the  new  Balkan  landscape  (p.  103).  The  strategic  interests  of  the  United 
States  were  thus  fulfilled  -  without  the  US  government  getting  involved. 

This  is  what  Avant  calls  "foreign  policy  by  proxy"  (pp.  104-113, 152-153). 
Thanks  to  proxies  of  this  sort,  the  US  government  (and  other  governments, 
for  that  matter)  has  the  leverage  to  "affect  conditions  abroad  without  mo- 
bilizing broad  support  for  troops  or  (sometimes)  even  money"  (p.  68).  The 
opportunities  private  military  companies  create  for  foreign  policy  by  proxy 
should  also  be  regarded  as  a  functional  benefit  of  privatization  and,  as  thus, 
a  reason  for  governments'  opting  for  military  contracting. 

Modern  mercenaries? 

With  the  exception  of  Scahill,  the  analysts  whose  work  I  am  examining  here 
are  resolute  against  the  identification  of  contractors  as  mercenaries.  It  is  fair 
to  state  that  this  is  at  least  in  part  because  they  build  on  the  internationally 
recognized  definition  of  "mercenary".  This  definition  was  crafted  as  an 
international  response  to  the  problems  wrought  by  mercenary  involvement 
in  Africa  during  the  decolonization  period.34  From  the  1950s  to  well  into  the 
1970s,  foreign  soldiers  for  hire  abounded  in  decolonizing  Africa  -  the  most 
well-known  case  is  Congo  in  the  1960s,  where  French,  British,  and  South 
African  mercenaries  were  recruited  to  fight  for  a  secessionist  movement; 
and  it  was  an  Anglo-Belgian  mining  cartel  which  hired  them  in  defense  of 
its  commercial  interests.35  The  international  community  was  then  urged 
to  deal  with  the  problem  of  mercenary  involvement  in  conflicts,  and  the 
consequent  legal  arrangements  aimed  at  banning  the  trade  in  "guns  for 
hire". 


34  Chesterman  and  Lehnardt,  From  Mercenaries  to  Market,  p.  1;  Percy,  "Morality  and  Regula- 
tion", pp.  12,  24;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  37. 

35  Mclntyre  and  Weiss,  "Weak  Governments  in  Search  of  Strength",  p.  67;  Singer,  Corporate 
Warriors,  p.  37. 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


629 


The  use  of  mercenaries  is  thus  outlawed  by  international  agreements, 
that  is,  the  Geneva  Conventions36  and  the  International  Convention  against 
the  Recruitment,  Use,  Financing,  and  Training  of  Mercenaries.37  According 
to  the  International  Convention,  a  mercenary  is 

someone  who  is  specifically  recruited  for  the  purpose  of  participating 
in  a  concerted  act  of  violence  aimed  at  overthrowing  a  government 
or  undermining  the  territorial  integrity  of  a  state,  is  motivated  by  the 
desire  for  private  gain  and  material  compensation,  is  neither  a  national 
nor  a  resident  of  the  state  against  which  such  [an]  act  is  directed,  has 
not  been  sent  by  a  state  on  official  duty,  and  is  not  a  member  of  the 
armed  forces  of  the  state  on  whose  territory  the  act  is  undertaken.38 

This  is  obviously  a  very  restricted  definition.  And  this  is  not  accidental, 
because  the  signatory  states  had  an  interest  in  keeping  the  definition  as 
specific  as  possible  so  that  they  could  use  mercenaries  in  internal  conflicts.39 
It  is  equally  obvious  that  private  contractors  do  not  qualify  as  mercenaries  if 
we  are  to  employ  this  legal  definition.  For  one  thing,  contemporary  contrac- 
tors are  not  individual  mercenaries,  but  they  have  evolved  into  business 
enterprises,  which  are  similar  in  form  to  any  other  sort  of  enterprise,  having 
CEOs,  shareholders,  and  the  like.40  In  addition  to  the  "corporatization"  of 
private  military  services,41  the  analysts  also  underline  that  today's  contrac- 
tors are  employed  by  legal  governments42  and  that  they  are  sanctioned  by 
their  parent  states.43  All  in  all,  the  argument  is  that  modern  contractors  are 
"market-driven",  "state-sanctioned",  and  hence,  legal. 

36  Article  47  of  the  First  Additional  Protocol  of  1977  deals  with  the  issue  of  mercenaries. 

37  This  is  a  UN  convention,  which  was  opened  to  signature  in  1989  but  entered  into  force  only 
in  2001  after  many  ratifications. 

38  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force,  p.  231. 

39  O'Brien,  "What  Should  and  What  Should  Not  Be  Regulated?",  pp.  34-35;  Singer,  Corporate 
Warriors,  p.  41. 

40  Chesterman  and  Lehnardt,  From  Mercenaries  to  Market,  p.  7;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors, 
pp.  45-46. 

41  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  40. 

42  This  is  not  necessarily  the  case,  however.  Singer  notes  that  private  military  companies  have 
worked  for  rebels,  drug  cartels,  and  even  jihadist  groups  -  the  latter  received  military  training 
in  combat  techniques  and  explosive  devices  from  a  British  military  company  in  the  late  1990s: 
Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  pp.  181,  220. 

43  This  is  an  overgeneralization  too:  the  South  African  government  chose  to  delegitimize 
private  military  companies  by  legislation  in  1998:  Lehnardt,  "Private  Military  Companies  and 
State  Responsibility",  p.  139. 


630 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


On  the  other  hand,  for  some,  the  problem  with  the  term  "mercenary" 
is  more  analytical.  For  instance,  Avant  refrains  from  using  the  epithet 
precisely  because  it  is  a  slippery  term:  it  has  been  employed  to  describe 
anything  from  the  Hessian  troops  to  the  adventurous  individual  men 
roaming  Africa  during  Cold  War  years.  This,  Avant  says,  makes  the  term 
analytically  quite  unserviceable.44 

There  is  yet  another  argument  in  favor  of  dropping  the  mercenary  label. 
Contemporary  private  companies,  the  argument  goes,  simply  do  not  do  what 
"mercenaries"  of  the  previous  eras  had  done.  As  Avant  writes,  "today's  PSCs 
do  not  so  much  provide  the  foot  soldiers,  but  more  often  act  as  supporters, 
trainers,  and  force  multipliers  for  local  forces".  In  other  words,  the  fact 
that  (most)  contractors  are  not  engaged  in  combat  operations  is  assumed 
to  justify  the  distinction  between  traditional  mercenaries  and  modern 
contractors.  There  seem  to  be  at  least  two  problems  with  this  presumption. 
On  the  one  hand,  they  may  be  small  in  number,  but  some  private  military 
companies  do  engage  in  combat.  On  the  other  hand,  it  can  be  plausibly 
claimed  that  noncombat  functions  are  no  less  military.  Not  only  did  they 
used  to  be  considered  military  functions  to  be  performed  (almost)  exclu- 
sively by  national  militaries,  it  is  also  the  case  that  both  logistics  support 
and  training  are  there  to  facilitate  actual  combat. 

Disaggregating  the  industry 

It  is  easily  discerned  that  there  is  a  strong  tendency  in  the  literature  to 
dissociate  active/armed/offensive  services  from  passive/unarmed/defensive 
services  -  as  well  as  the  companies  that  provide  them.  The  distinction 
boils  down  to  the  opposition  of  combat  and  noncombat  services  and/or 
companies.  Kevin  A.  O'Brien's  contribution  to  From  Mercenaries  to  Market 
is  a  case  in  point.  O'Brien  distinguishes  "contracted  operations  that  aim  to 
alter  the  strategic  landscape  and  those  that  involving  local  -  in  the  narrow- 
est sense  -  immediate  impact  only"  (p.  40).  The  former  category  denotes 
operations  such  as  "defeating  an  insurgency,  ending  a  war,  undertaking 
peacekeeping  or  peace-enforcement  operations,  rescuing  a  besieged  govern- 
ment" (p.  38),  whereas  the  latter  involves  "nonfront-line"  services  such 
as  "transport,  force  professionalization  training,  para-medical  services, 
physical  guarding,  humanitarian  aid,  convoy  protection,  administration 
and  logistics"  (p.  40,  n.  13).  This  corresponds  to  the  much-employed  distinc- 


44  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force,  p.  30. 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


631 


tion,  respectively,  between  private  military  companies  (PMCs)  and  private 
security  companies.  According  to  O'Brien,  companies  that  do  aim  at  altering 
the  strategic  landscape  -  PMCs  -  are  atypical  of  the  industry  (p.  29),  as 
PSCs  are  now  perceived  as  "the  norm"  (p.  35).  This  assertion  to  the  effect 
that  the  industry  is  evolving  into  noncombat,  security  service  providers  is 
very  typical  of  the  literature.  The  problem,  however,  is  that  the  practice  of 
contracting  in  Iraq  poses  major  challenges  to  the  proposed  distinction,  as 
admitted  by  O'Brien  himself  alongside  Sarah  Percy,  who  seems  to  employ  a 
similar  typology.  That  is,  the  presence  of  "security"  firms  which  are  armed 
and  which  occasionally  engage  in  combat-like  operations  in  Iraq  eludes 
this  categorization.45 

Much  the  same  is  true  for  Avant's  attempt  at  classifying  the  private 
military  industry.  Avant  notes  that  the  very  same  firm  may  provide  different 
kinds  of  services  to  different  clients,  which  makes  classification  on  the  basis 
of  firm  unconvincing.  She  instead  suggests  that  contracts  be  taken  as  the 
unit  of  analysis  (p.  17).  She  then  distinguishes  contracts  that  offer  military 
services  ("external  security  services")  such  as  operational  support,  military 
training,  and  logistic  support  from  those  offering  police  functions  ("internal 
security  services")  such  as  site  security,  intelligence,  and  crime  prevention 
(pp.  16-21).  Nonetheless,  she  admits  that  there  is  a  grey  area  between  the 
two  sets  of  functions.  This  is  the  case,  she  writes,  with  contracts  that  offer 
counterinsurgency  services.  Companies  that  operate  on  such  contracts 
carry  out  armed  response  against  insurgent  groups.  Interestingly,  she  men- 
tions Blackwater  here.  Given  the  fact  that  what  Blackwater  does  in  Iraq  is 
mostly  site  and  convoy  security,  its  contracts  would  normally  lie  within  the 
category  of  police  functions.  But  in  reality  the  company  has  been  involved 
in  offensive  attacks  against  Iraqi  insurgents  "in  ways  that  [are]  hard  to 
distinguish  from  combat"  (pp.  21-22).  And  this  is  far  from  an  aberration;  on 
the  contrary  the  presence  of  military  companies  in  Iraq  evinces  a  "blurring 
of  the  lines  between  policing  and  combat"  (p.  22). 

More  promising  is  the  classification  proposed  in  Corporate  Warriors. 
Singer  thinks  that  binary  oppositions  such  as  active/passive,  armed/ 
unarmed,  and  offensive/defensive,  which  are  used  to  differentiate  the 
services  provided  by  military  companies,  are  not  very  fruitful  for  two 
important  reasons:  first,  they  ignore  that  there  usually  are  transitions  and 
some  overlapping  between  the  seemingly  opposite  pairs;  secondly,  they 
are  based  on  an  antiquated  notion  of  "war"  as,  for  instance,  being  armed 

45  O'Brien,  "What  Should  and  What  Should  Not  Be  Regulated?",  p.  35;  Percy,  "Morality  and 
Regulation",  pp.  12-14. 


632 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


or  otherwise  does  not  make  much  difference  today  (pp.  89-90).  It  is  also 
the  case  that  this  kind  of  classifications  conveys  the  idea  that  the  second 
terms  in  the  oppositions  are  somehow  less  central  to  military  practice;  for 
Singer,  however,  this  is  an  erroneous  assumption  -  a  so-called  passive  or 
unarmed  activity  may  equally  have  "strategic  effects"  (p.  89).  Singer  instead 
proposes  a  three-tier  typology  of  military  companies:  military  provider 
firms,  military  consultant  firms,  and  military  support  firms. 

Military  provider  firms  sell  actual  combat  services  in  the  form  of  either 
implementation  or  command;  and,  depending  on  the  contract  and  the 
situation  in  hand,  they  may  provide  "stand-alone  tactical  military  units" 
or  smaller,  specialized  units  to  augment  the  public  forces  of  the  client 
country  (pp.  92-93).  The  best  examples  are  Executive  Outcomes  (South 
African)  and  Sandline  International  (British),  which  made  headlines  in 
1990s  helping  the  governments  in  Sierra  Leone  and  Angola  fight  off  armed 
rebels.  Executive  Outcomes,  which  is  probably  the  most  controversial 
privatized  military  firm,  is  the  case  that  Singer  examines  in  his  study,  and 
in  reading  his  account  it  is  easy  to  see  why  its  operations  in  Sierra  Leone 
and  Angola  aroused  so  much  disturbance.  First  of  all,  the  intervention  of  a 
private  foreign  actor  as  a  belligerent  party  into  someone  else's  "war"  seemed 
outrageous  to  the  contemporary  observers.  Secondly,  Executive  Outcomes 
recruited  exclusively  from  the  bloodstained  special  operations  personnel 
of  the  apartheid  regime  (pp.  102-103).  Thirdly,  the  financially  challenged 
governments  of  Sierra  Leone  and  Angola  could  not  actually  pay  for  the 
services  of  the  firm  in  cash  or  in  installments;  instead,  Executive  Outcomes 
was  indirectly  paid  in  oil  and  mining  concessions  -  indirectly  because  it 
was  an  affiliated  company,  the  Branch-Heritage  Group,  which  was  given 
mining  privileges  (pp.  104-105, 109, 117). 

It  is  possible  to  observe  that  most  analysts  assume  that  Executive  Out- 
comes is  somehow  an  aberrent  case;  and  they  seem  to  read  too  much  into 
company's  demise.  That  is  to  say,  it  is  as  though  the  company's  decision  to 
dissolve  itself  (in  1999)  is  a  sign  that  the  industry  is  maturing  and  becoming 
a  respectable  (meaning,  above  all,  noncombat)  international  player.  On 
the  other  hand,  Singer  appears  to  see  the  matter  in  another  light,  because 
he  writes  that  the  closure  of  the  firm  in  no  way  signaled  the  end  of  the 
military  provider  sector,  which  is  still  alive  with  many  active  firms  (p.  118). 
Furthermore,  unlike  some  others,  Singer  does  not  imply  that  provider  firms 
are  now  employed  by  "failed  states"  of  the  third  world.  On  the  contrary,  he 
writes  that  there  are  provider  firms  at  work  in  Iraq,  employed  by  the  USA, 
doing  "convoy  escort  and  protection  of  key  bases,  offices,  and  facilities  from 
rebel  attack",  among  which  he  cites  Blackwater  (p.  248). 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


633 


Back  to  Singer's  typology:  the  second  type,  i.e.,  the  consultant  firms, 
provide  military  advice  and  training  to  armies  (pp.  95-96).  Singer  points 
out  that,  although  consultant  firms  are  not  engaged  in  actual  combat,  the 
services  they  provide  have  strategic  impact  on  many  regional  hostilities,  as 
evinced  in  the  Balkans  when  the  training  Croatian  forces  received  from  a  US 
firm  (MPRI)  eventually  changed  the  balance  of  power  in  the  region  (p.  95). 
Singer  focuses  upon  MPRI,  a  very  high-profile  American  company,  whose 
ranks  are  filled  with  the  "highest  levels  of  retired  US  military  personnel" 
(p.  119).  MPRI  has  had  many  contracts  (both  analysis  and  implementation) 
with  the  US  military  as  well  as  with  foreign  militaries.  The  peculiar  thing 
about  MPRI  is  its  close  ties  both  to  government  and  to  current  military 
ranks,  which  render  the  firm  almost  "a  private  extension  of  the  US  military" 
(p.  121).  There  is  also  a  self-proclaimed  company  policy:  never  work  for  a 
foreign  client  unless  that  suits  US  foreign  policy  goals  -  this,  too,  brings 
the  company  into  a  cozy  relationship  with  the  government,  which  in  turn 
has  allegedly  recommended  the  firm  to  some  foreign  allies  (pp.  119, 121). 

Finally,  military  support  firms  support  troops  in  the  field  by  providing 
"nonlethal  aid  and  assistance,  including  logistics,  intelligence,  technical 
support,  supply,  and  transportation"  (p.  97).  Many  of  these  firms  began  in 
business  as  nonmilitary  engineering  firms  and  later  diversified  into  mili- 
tary services  (p.  136).  Support  firms  comprise  the  largest  sector  in  military 
services  (p.  97).  This  has  been  a  result  of  the  confluence  of  the  downsizing 
of  the  logistics  units  of  national  militaries  and  the  almost  contemporaneous 
upsurge  in  multinational  operations  (pp.  97, 147).  This  is  especially  the 
case  with  the  US  military,  which  was,  in  the  early  1990s,  "underresourced" 
and  "overextended"  at  once  with  deployments  in  Africa,  the  Middle  East, 
and  the  Balkans  (p.  147).  Singer  notes  that  most  studies  on  the  subject  of 
privatized  military  services  do  not  examine  this  third  kind  of  firm,  because 
they  take  the  services  provided  by  the  support  sector  to  be  no  different 
from  what  "traditional  contractors"  conventionally  do  (p.  97).  This  is  not  so 
for  Singer  -  what  support  firms  do  might  seem  "less  mercenary",  but  their 
services  are  nevertheless  "military"  as  they  are  indispensable  to  military 
missions  (pp.  97, 145-146).  Here  Singer  takes  up  the  United  States'  favorite 
logistics  support  firm,  Brown  &  Root  Services  (BRS),  which  accompanied 
US  forces  everywhere  from  Rwanda  to  Kosovo  in  the  1990s.  With  the  advent 
of  the  "war  on  terror"  BRS  got  some  new  lucrative  contracts,  including  a 
contract  for  the  construction  of  a  military  base  in  Central  Asia,  and  it  also 
helped  build  the  Guantanamo  detention  camp  in  Cuba  (p.  146).  Then  the 
company  (now  called  KBR)  signed  a  number  of  logistics  contracts  in  Iraq, 
to  an  estimated  value  of  $20.1  billion  in  total  (pp.  246-247). 


634 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


Before  going  on  to  the  next  section,  it  is  worthwhile  to  say  a  few  words  on 
Blackwater,  as  it  figures  prominently  in  the  discussions  about  classification. 
Blackwater  is  indeed  an  atypical  case  because,  while  military  companies 
that  do  engage  in  combat  are  usually  at  pains  to  deny  it,  which  surely  is  about 
the  desire  to  be  recognized  as  legitimate  and  respectable  firms,  Blackwater 
boasts  about  its  military  role.  Blackwater's  history  in  Iraq  is  highlighted 
by  a  number  of  high-profile  security  contracts,  the  first  of  which  came 
about  in  2003  when  the  company  was  hired  to  provide  personal  security  for 
pro-consul  Paul  Bremer.46  Other  contracts  then  followed,  as  a  result  of  which 
Blackwater  came  to  provide  security  for  "at  least  five  regional  US  occupation 
headquarters".47  In  the  course  of  these  contracts,  Blackwater  was  implicated 
in  many  suspicious  incidents,  all  of  which  involved  civilian  Iraqi  casualties; 
and  the  company  was  accused  of  misconduct.  The  company  owner,  Eric 
Prince,  and  its  lawyers  testified  before  congressional  committees  a  number 
of  times  as  a  result;  their  defense  was  all  about  Blackwater's  role  as  part  of 
the  US  military  force:  for  them,  Blackwater  employees  should  be  immune 
from  prosecution,  because  if  they  were  made  liable,  then  this  would  impair 
"nation's  war-fighting  capacity"  (pp.  57,  300-301).  The  company  could  not 
restore  its  tarnished  image,  however,  and  changed  its  name  in  2009  (it  is 
now  called  Xe  Limited)  as  part  of  an  attempt  at  rebranding. 

The  employees 

It  is  difficult  to  say  that  military  contracting  as  a  form  of  employment  in 
any  sense  comprises  a  major  concern  for  the  studies  under  consideration. 
On  the  contrary,  the  issue  is  largely  neglected  or  subordinated  to  other 
concerns.  For  instance,  Avant  takes  up  the  issue  summarily  just  a  few  times 
and  in  a  very  limited  sense.  She  claims  that  contractors'  background  is 
important  in  deciding  how  privatization  affects  social  control,  because 
if  companies  employ  ex-soldiers,  who  therefore  have  been  socialized  into 
norms  of  human  rights,  the  rule  of  law,  and  the  like,  there  is  a  much  greater 
likelihood  that  privatization  of  force  will  reinforce  compliance  with  such 
values  (pp.  60, 110-111, 130-131, 133).  There  is  no  further  discussion  of  any  other 
dimension  of  the  composition  of  the  workforce  or  working  conditions  in 
this  almost  300-page  book. 


46  Scahill,  Blackwater,  p.  133. 

47  Ibid.,  p.  186. 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


635 


This  is  not  to  say  that  no  insight  emerges  from  the  books.  There  is  some 
information  regarding  the  type  of  employment,  for  instance.  That  is,  Singer 
calls  privatized  military  firms  "virtual  companies"  because  they  have  a 
very  small  number  of  permanent,  full-time  employees;  when  contracts 
are  signed,  positions  are  filled  from  companies'  databases  of  qualified 
personnel;  and  databases  are  usually  supplemented  by  advertisements.48 
Databases  are  nonexclusive;  a  special  operations  veteran  may  be  on  the 
databases  of  several  companies,  and  may  work  for  Blackwater  on  a  contract 
and  then  for  Triple  Canopy  on  another. 

There  is  not  much  information  about  the  databases  or  the  people  included 
in  them.  Scahill  notes  that  Blackwater's  database  includes  as  many  as  21,000 
men  (p.  433).  Singer  mentions  MPRI's  database  of  12,500  on-call  personnel, 
95  per  cent  of  whom  are  former  US  military  personnel  (p.  120).  In  more 
general  terms,  Singer  writes  that  qualified  people  included  in  databases 
are  predominantly  former  soldiers  of  all  ranks  from  all  over  the  world,  who 
retired,  left  their  forces,  or  were  downsized  and  that  they  are  mostly  in  their 
twenties  or  thirties  (p.  76).  And  although  he  cites  low  pay  and  "diminishing 
prestige"  as  reasons  for  young  people  to  leave  armed  forces  and  work  for 
private  companies  (p.  77),  he  also  mentions  that  this  new  industry  "provides 
an  employment  opportunity  for  those  [...]  who  have  been  forced  out  of 
public  military  activities  for  past  misdeeds"  (p.  221). 

We  know  that  ex-soldiers  from  the  United  States,  the  UK,  and  South 
Africa  are  featured  extensively.  There  are  grounds  to  assume  that  most 
of  these  men  work  for  companies  from  their  native  countries.  It  can  also 
be  speculated  that  these  men  get  jobs  or  get  on  the  company  databases 
through  former  colleagues  in  a  fairly  informal  way.  As  for  the  rest,  all  the 
Fijians,  Jordanians,  Colombians,  Chileans,  etc.,  it  is  necessary  to  ask  how 
they  become  affiliated  with  the  companies.  Apparently,  there  are  some 
middlemen  who  recruit  ex-soldiers  and  put  them  in  touch  with  private 
military  firms.  This  is  at  least  true  for  Chilean  ex-commandos  who  work 
for  Blackwater  in  Iraq.  Scahill  reports  that  a  firm  called  Grupo  Tactico, 
which  was  founded  by  an  ex-army  officer  from  Chile,  mediates  between 
the  ex-soldiers  and  Blackwater  (2008: 246-265). 

Until  now,  we  have  been  talking  about  the  elite  security  personnel  who 
do  convoy,  site,  or  personal  security.  These  men  are  on  regular  pay  and, 
according  to  Singer,  they  are  "paid  anywhere  from  two  to  ten  times  as  much 
as  in  the  official  army  and  the  police"  (2008:  74).  Reading  Scahill's  book, 
one  gets  the  impression  that  there  is  a  significant  pay  discrepancy  on  the 


48  Avant,  The  Market  for  Force,  pp.  15-16;  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  75. 


636 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


basis  of  nationality:  Chileans  appear  to  be  the  most  expensive  ex-soldiers 
of  Latin  America.  For  Scahill,  this  is  because  they  had  been  seasoned  in 
General  Augusto  Pinochet's  dictatorship. 

The  elite  security  personnel  are  in  fact  only  a  minority  of  contractors 
working  in  Iraq.  There  are  thousands  of  people  filling  low-paid,  unqualified 
positions,  such  as  washing  dishes  or  doing  laundry.  Carafano  (p.  67)  points 
out  that  less  than  20  per  cent  of  these  contractors  in  Iraq  are  US  citizens. 
As  for  the  rest,  there  are  not  mostly  Iraqis  either.  For  instance,  the  majority 
of  KBR  employees  in  2005  were  shown  to  be  "third-party  nationals"  with 
quite  a  number  of  people  from  the  Philippines.  The  so-called  third-party 
nationals  are  a  major  concern  for  the  writer  as  they  are  "more  at  risk  of 
abuse  and  exploitation"  (p.  109). 

The  issue  was  brought  to  public  attention  when  Cam  Simpson  of  the 
Chicago  Tribune  wrote  a  report  in  2005  on  Nepalese  menial  workers  em- 
ployed in  US  military  bases  in  Iraq.  Workers  were  recruited  by  brokers  in 
Nepal  who  did  business  with  Middle  Eastern  firms  providing  workforce 
for  KBR-run  bases  -  the  Middle  Eastern  brokers  actually  were  subcontrac- 
tors to  KBR.  Most  of  the  men  from  Nepal  were  misinformed  about  their 
destination:  they  did  not  know  that  they  would  work  in  military  bases 
in  Iraq.  Yet  they  could  not  leave:  not  only  were  they  indebted  to  Nepalese 
brokers  on  the  one  hand,  the  Middle  Eastern  brokers  had  also  seized  their 
passports.  The  report  pointed  out  that  this  was  human  trafficking  (not  the 
least  because  the  Nepalese  government  prohibits  its  citizens  from  working 
in  Iraq)  and  that  KBR  was  denying  responsibility  as  recruitment  was  done 
by  its  subcontractors. 

The  plight  of  third-country  nationals  working  as  contractors  in  Iraq  is 
thus  a  pressing  problem,  so  much  so  that  the  International  Peace  Operations 
Association  (IPOA),  the  industry  association  formed  with  the  leadership 
of  the  notorious  Blackwater,  has  included  the  issue  in  its  code  of  conduct 
stating  that  potential  employees  should  be  thoroughly  informed  about  the 
nature  of  their  employment,  that  they  should  be  "treated  with  respect  and 
dignity",  that  they  should  not  be  paid  less  just  because  of  their  nationality, 
and  that  they  should  be  free  to  terminate  employment.49 

And,  finally,  it  should  come  as  no  surprise  that  contract  employees  are 
not  unionized.50 


49  Carafano,  Private  Sector,  Public  Wars,  p.  no. 

50  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  200,  n.  20. 


PRIVATE  CONTRACTORS  IN  WAR  FROM  THE  1990S  TO  THE  PRESENT 


637 


What  to  privatize? 

Is  there  an  unambiguous  dividing  line  between  military  functions  which 
are  appropriate  to  privatize  and  those  which  are  not?  This  question  may 
be  answered  in  a  number  of  steps.  First,  one  should  inquire  whether  there 
are  any  inherently  governmental  functions  which,  therefore,  should  not  be 
outsourced.  Combat  functions,  for  instance,  can  legitimately  be  regarded 
as  one  such.  There  have  been  numerous  allegations,  raised  by  the  press, 
politicians,  and  analysts,  that  private  companies  do  engage  in  combat  in 
Iraq.  The  US  Department  of  Defense  was  quick  to  respond,  stating  that  "PSCs 
are  not  being  used  to  perform  inherently  military  functions  and  that  contrac- 
tors are  utilized  to  free  troops  for  offensive  actions".51  Similarly,  Pentagon 
regulations  stipulate  that  private  contractors  can  use  "deadly  force"  either 
in  self-defense  or  when  it  is  "necessary  to  execute  their  security  missions, 
such  as  protecting  embassy  personnel,  consistent  with  the  tasks  given  in 
their  contract";  yet  launching  "preemptive  attacks"  cannot  be  interpreted  as 
one  such  mission  since  it  is  regarded  an  inherently  governmental  activity.52 
So  almost  all  -  but  apparently  not  all  -  forms  of  offensive  action  are  beyond 
what  contractors  are  entitled  to  do.  But  the  problem  is  that  functions  such  as 
personal  and  site  security  are  indeed  privatized  in  Iraq  and  most  of  the  time 
it  is  difficult  to  tell  offense  from  defense,  because  this  is  not  a  battlefield  in 
the  classical  sense.  As  Lehnardt  argues,53  in  "low-intensity  conflict"  areas 
such  as  Iraq,  where  there  are  no  clear  frontlines,  "protecting  individuals  and 
buildings  can  easily  slide  into  participating  in  hostilities".  This  might  be  one 
reason  why  the  counterposition  of  PMCs  and  PSCs  is  so  difficult  to  sustain. 

Secondly,  it  may  be  the  case  that  some  functions  are  too  critical  or  stra- 
tegic to  be  left  to  the  commercial  sector.  After  all,  it  is  possible  to  argue  that 
a  national  military  should  be  self-sufficient  to  a  certain  extent.  This  does 
appear  to  be  a  major  concern,  because  according  to  the  military  doctrine, 

the  US  military  is  supposed  to  privatize  only  those  services  that  are 
not  "emergency-essential  support"  functions;  that  is,  those  functions 
which,  if  not  immediately  available,  would  not  impair  the  military's 
mobilization  and  wartime  operations.54 


51  Lehnardt,  "Private  Military  Companies  and  State  Responsibility",  p.  147,  emphasis  added. 

52  Carafano,  Private  Sector,  Public  Wars,  p.  48. 

53  Lehnardt,  "Private  Military  Companies  and  State  Responsibility",  p.  148. 

54  Singer,  Corporate  Warriors,  p.  162. 


638 


S.  YELDA  KAYA 


Singer,  though,  asserts  that  the  Pentagon  did  outsource  certain  mission- 
critical  functions.  He  takes  up  weapons  procurement  and  writes  that, 
while  the  army  is  supposed  to  "achieve  self-sufficiency  in  maintaining 
and  operating  new  weapons  systems  within  12  months  of  their  introduc- 
tion", in  reality,  the  operation  and  maintenance  of  weapons  are  contracted 
out.55  Hence  the  military  is  depended  on  private  companies  in  this  crucial 
function.  Finally,  it  is  possible  to  speculate  that  certain  functions  are  just 
too  risky  to  outsource,  because,  for  examples,  there  may  be  abuses.  Abu 
Ghraib,  for  instance.  Recalling  the  incident,  Isenberg  claims  that  tasks 
such  as  interrogation  of  prisoners  are  "too  sensitive  to  be  outsourced";  they 
should  thus  remain  governmental  functions.56  The  reality  is  quite  different, 
of  course.  To  wrap  up,  although  there  is  some  notion  in  the  military  doctrine 
regarding  what  not  to  outsource,  it  has  already  been  transgressed. 

While  members  of  the  military,  scholars,  and  journalists  complain  that 
past  experience  of  contracting  bred  a  massive  problem  of  over-outsourcing, 
the  industry  is  heading  in  new  directions.  Take  Blackwater.  Scahill  writes 
that  company's  latest  interest  is  immigration  and  border  security.  Here,  as 
always,  the  company  is  in  tune  with  the  neoconservative  political  agenda 
which  calls  for  outsourcing  of  border-training  programs  (pp.  401-405).  On 
the  other  hand,  Blackwater  aspires  to  diversify  into  a  peacekeeping  force 
which,  they  hope,  will  be  hired  by  NATO  or  the  UN;  the  company  has  already 
presented  a  detailed  proposal  to  the  UN  regarding  Blackwater  deployment  in 
Darfur  (pp.  411-420).  Meanwhile,  a  development  of  immense  importance  has 
already  occurred:  following  Hurricane  Katrina,  Blackwater  was  deployed 
on  US  soil  for  the  first  time,  and  that  was  on  a  contract  with  Department 
of  Homeland  Security  to  protect  federal  reconstruction  projects  (pp.  60-61, 
392-400).  And  it  was  not  just  Blackwater  -  other  military  companies  too 
were  in  New  Orleans,  their  employees  fully  armed  and  in  battle  gear. 


55  Ibid. 

56  Isenberg,  "A  Government  in  Search  of  Cover",  p.  92. 


Collective  bibliography 


Aaronsohn,  Lexander,  Turk  Ordusuyla  Filistin'de:  Bir  Yahudi  Askerin  I.  Diinya  Sava§7  Notlan, 
trans.  Necmettin  Alkan  (Istanbul,  2003). 

Adams,  R.J.Q.,  and  P.P.  Poirer,  The  Conscription  Controversy  in  Great  Britain  7900-7978  (Basing- 
stoke, 1987). 

Adams,  S.,  "The  Gentry  of  North  Wales  and  the  Earl  of  Leicester's  Expedition  to  the  Netherlands, 

1585-6",  Welsh  History  Review,  7  (1974),  pp.  129-147. 
Adams,  S.,  "Military  Obligations  of  Leasehold  Tenants  in  Lancastrian  Denbigh:  A  Footnote", 

Transactions  of  Denbighshire  Historical  Society,  24  (1975),  pp.  205-208. 
Adamson,  Lome,  "The  Mughal  Armies:  A  Re-appraisal",/o«™a/  of  the  Bihar  Research  Society, 

59  (1973).  PP- 138-144- 

Adanir,  Fikret,  "Non-Muslims  in  the  Ottoman  Army  and  the  Ottoman  Defeat  in  the  Balkan  War 
of  1913-1913",  in  Ronald  G.  Suny,  Fatma  M.  Gocek,  and  Norman  M.  Naimark  (eds),  A  Question 
of  Genocide:  Armenians  and  Turks  at  the  End  of  the  Ottoman  Empire  (Oxford,  2011),  pp.  113-125. 

Aebersold,  R.,  Die  Militarpolitik  des  Kantons  Solothurn  in  der  Restaurationszeit  7874-7837  (Solo- 
thurn,  1975). 

Aellig,  J.J.,  DieAufhebung  der  schweizerischen  Sbldnerdienste  imMeinungskampf des  neunzehten 

fahrhunderts  (Basel  [etc.],  1954). 
Agoston,  Gabor,  "Empires  and  Warfare  in  East-Central  Europe,  1550-1750:  The  Ottoman-Habsburg 

Rivalry  and  Military  Transformation",  in  Frank  Tallett  and  D.J.B.  Trim  (eds),  European 

Warfare  7350-7/50  (Cambridge,  2010),  pp.  110-134. 
Agoston,  Gabor,  "Military  Transformation  in  the  Ottoman  Empire  and  Russia,  1500-1800",  Kritika, 

12, 2  (2011),  pp.  281-319. 

Aharoni,  Reuven,  The  Pasha's  Bedouin:  Tribes  and  State  in  the  Egypt  of  Mehemet  Ali,  7805-7848 
(London,  2007). 

The  Ain-i-Akbari  (A  Gazetteer  and  Administrative  Manual  of  Akbar's  Empire  and  part  History 

of  India)  by  Abul  Fazl,  vol.  I,  trans,  into  English  by  H.  Blochmann,  ed.  by  Lieut.-Col.  D.C. 

Phillott,  vols  II  and  III,  tr.  into  English  by  Col.  H.S.  Jarrett,  corrected  and  further  annotated 

byjadunath  Sarkar  (reprint,  Calcutta,  1993). 
The  Akbar-Nama,  by  Abul  Fazl,  3  vols,  tr.  from  the  Persian  by  H.  Beveridge  (1921,  reprint,  New 

Delhi,  1989). 

Akcam,  Taner,  "Ermeni  Meselesi  Hallolunmustur":  Osmanli  Belgelerine  Gore  Savas  Yillar7nda 

Ermenilere  Ybnelik  Politikalar  (Istanbul,  2008). 
Akgiindiiz,  A.,  "Kavanin-i  yenujeriyan-i  dergah-i  ali",  in  OsmanU  kanunndmeleri  ve  hukuki 

tahlilleri,  vol.  IX  (Istanbul,  1996),  pp.  127-367. 
Aksan,  Virginia  FL,  "Locating  the  Ottomans  among  Early  Modern  Empires",/o«raa/  of  Early 

Modern  History,  3  (1999),  pp.  21-39. 
Aksan,  Virginia  FL,  "Ottoman  Military  and  Social  Transformations,  1826-28:  Engagement  and 

Resistance  in  a  Moment  of  Global  Imperialism",  in  Stephen  M.  Streeter,  John  C.  Weaver,  and 

William  D.  Coleman  (eds),  Empires  and  Autonomy:  Moments  in  the  History  of  Globalization 

(Vancouver,  2009),  pp.  61-78. 
Aksan,  Virginia  FL,  "Ottoman  Military  Recruitment  Strategies  in  the  Late  Eighteenth  Century",  in 

Erik-Jan  Ziircher  (ed.),  Arming  the  State:  Military  Conscription  in  the  Middle  East  and  Central 

Asia,  77/5-7925  (London  [etc.],  1999),  pp.  21-39. 


640 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Aksan,  Virginia  H.,  "Ottoman  Recruitment  in  the  Late  Eighteenth  Century",  in  Erik-Jan  Ziircher 

(ed.),  Arming  the  State:  Military  Conscription  in  the  Middle  East  and  Central  Asia,  1775-1925 

(London  [etc.],  1999),  pp.  21-40. 
Aksan,  Virginia  H.,  "Ottoman  War  and  Warfare:  1453-1812",  in  Jeremy  Black  (ed.),  War  in  the  Early 

Modern  World:  7450-1875  (1999,  reprint,  London,  2004),  pp.  147-175. 
Aksan,  Virginia  H.,  Ottoman  Wars,  7700-7870:  An  Empire  Besieged  (Harlow,  2007). 
Aksan,  Virginia  LL,  "Turks  and  Ottomans  Among  the  Empires:  Review  Article",  International 

Journal  of  Turkish  Studies,  15, 1-2  (2009),  pp.  103-114. 
Aksan,  Virginia  H.,  "Whatever  Happened  to  the  Janissaries?  Mobilization  for  the  1768-1774 

Russo- Ottoman  War",  War  in  History,  5, 1  (1998),  pp.  23-36. 
Aksan,  Virginia  H.,  "Whose  Territory  and  Whose  Peasants?  Ottoman  Boundaries  on  the  Danube 

in  the  1760s",  in  Fred  Anscombe  (ed.),  The  Ottoman  Balkans,  7750-7830  (Princeton,  2006), 

pp.  61-86. 

Alavi,  Seema,  The  Sepoys  and  the  Company:  Tradition  and  Transition  in  Northern  Indian  Military 

Culture  7770-7830  (New  Delhi,  1995). 
Albert,  D.,  "Staat  und  Gesellschaft,  1500-1745",  in  M.  Spindler  (ed.),  Handbuch  der  Bayerischen 

Geschichte,  2  vols  (Munich,  1966),  II. 
Ales,  S.,  I'armata  sarda  e  le  riforme  albertine,  7837-7842  (Rome,  1987). 

Ali,  M.  Athar,  "Causes  of  the  Rathor  Rebellion  of  1679",  inM.  Athar  Ali,  Mughal  India:  Studies  in 

Polity,  Ideas,  Society,  and  Culture  (Delhi,  2006),  pp.  253-261. 
Ali,  M.  Athar,  Mughal  India:  Studies  in  Polity,  Ideas,  Society,  and  Culture  (Delhi,  2006). 
Ali,  M.  Athar,  "Organization  of  the  Nobility:  Mansab,  Pay,  Conditions  of  Service",  in  Jos  J. L. 

Gommans  and  Dirk  H.A.  Kolff  (eds),  Warfare  and  Weaponry  in  South  Asia:  7000-7800  (Delhi, 

2001),  pp.  232-274. 

Ali,  M.  Athar,  "The  Passing  of  the  Empire:  The  Mughal  Case",  in  M.  Athar  Ali,  Mughal  India: 
Studies  in  Polity,  Ideas,  Society,  and  Culture  (Delhi,  2006),  pp.  337-349. 

Ali,  M.  Athar,  "Political  Structures  of  the  Islamic  Orient  in  the  Sixteenth  and  Seventeenth 
Centuries",  inM.  Athar  Ali,  Mughal  India:  Studies  in  Polity,  Ideas,  Society,  and  Culture  (Delhi, 
2006),  pp.  94-105- 

Ali,  M.  Athar,  "Sulh-i  Kul  and  the  Religious  Ideas  of  Akbar",  in  M.  Athar  Ali,  Mughal  India:  Studies 

in  Polity,  Ideas,  Society,  and  Culture  (Delhi,  2006),  pp.  158-172. 
Ali,  M.  Athar,  "Towards  an  Interpretation  of  the  Mughal  Empire",  in  M.  Athar  Ali,  Mughal  India: 

Studies  in  Polity,  Ideas,  Society,  and  Culture  (Delhi,  2006),  pp.  59-73. 
Allami,  Abu'l  Fazl,  The  A'in-i Akbari,  transl.  by  H.  Blochmann  and  H.S.  Jarrett,  2nd  rev.  edn  by 

D.C.  Phillott  and  Jadunath  Sarkar,  3  vols  (1927-1949,  reprint,  New  Delhi,  1977-1978). 
Ambashthya,  Brahmadeva  Prasad,  "The  Accounts  of  the  Ujjainiyas  in  Bihar", Journal  of  the  Bihar 

Research  Society,  47  (1961),  pp.  420-440. 
Amersfoort,  Herman,  Dienstplicht,  draagvtak  en  democratic  Visies  op  de  gewapende  burgerdienst 

in  Nederland  en  Europa  sinds  de  achttiende  eeuw  (The  Hague,  1995). 
Amersfoort,  Herman,  Koning  en  Kanton.  De  Nederlandse  staat  en  het  einde  van  de  Zwitserse 

krijgsdienst  hier  te  lande  7874-782$  (Den  Haag,  1988). 
Amersfoort,  Herman,  "Lodewijk  Thomson,  militair  waarnemer",  in  H.  Belien  et  al.  (eds),  In  de 

vaart  der  volken.  Nederlanders  rond  7goo  (Amsterdam,  1998),  pp.  98-113. 
Amersfoort,  Herman,  "De  strijd  om  het  leger  (1813-1840)",  in  C.A.  Tamse  and  E.  Witte  (eds), 

Staats-  en  Natievorming  in  Willem  I's  Koninkrijk  (7875-7830)  (Brussels,  1992),  pp.  186-206. 
Amery,  L.S.,  The  Times  History  of  the  War  in  South  Africa  7S99-7902,  7  vols  (London,  1900-1909). 
Anderson,  Fred,  Crucible  of  War:  The  Seven  Years  War  and  the  Fate  of  Empire  in  British  North 

America,  7754-7766  (New  York,  2000). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


641 


Anderson,  Fred,  A  People's  Army:  Massachusetts  Soldiers  and  Society  in  the  Seven  Years'  War 

(Chapel  Hill,  NC,  1984). 
Anderson,  M.S.,  War  and  Society  in  the  Old  Regime  1618-7789  (Leicester,  1988). 
Anderson,  0.,  "The  Growth  of  Christian  Militarism  in  Mid-Victorian  Britain",  English  Historical 

Review,  84  (1971),  pp.  46-72. 
Andre,  Louis,  Michel Le  Tellier  et  I'organisation  del'armee  monarchique  (Paris,  1906). 
Anonymous,  Essai  sur  I'etat  militaire  en  1825.  Observations  sur  le  sort  actuel  des  officiers,  sous- 

officiers  etsoldats  de  I'armee  (Paris,  1825). 
Anonymous,  Trattenimenti  militari:  della  educazione  morale  e  disciplinare  delsoldato  (Florence, 

1858). 

Anscombe,  Frederick  F,  "Albanians  and  Mountain  Bandits",  in  Frederick  F.  Anscombe  (ed.),  The 

Ottoman  Balkans,  1/50-1830  (Princeton,  2006),  pp.  87-133. 
Anscombe,  Frederick  F,  "Islam  and  the  Age  of  Ottoman  Reform",  Past  &  Present,  208  (August 

2010),  pp.  159-189. 

Appy,  Christian  G.,  Working-Class  War:  American  Combat  Soldiers  and  Vietnam  (Chapel  Hill, 
NC,  1993). 

Aquil,  Raziuddin,  "On  Islam  and  Kufr  in  the  Delhi  Sultanate:  Towards  a  Re-interpretation  of 
Ziya'  al-Din  Barani's  Fatawa-i  Jahandari" ',  in  Rajat  Datta  (ed.),  Rethinking  a  Millennium: 
Perspectives  on  Indian  History  from  the  Eighth  to  the  Eighteenth  Century,  Essays  for  Harbans 
Mukhia  (Delhi,  2008),  pp.  168-197. 

Aquil,  Raziuddin,  Sufism,  Culture,  and  Politics:  Afghans  and  Islam  in  Medieval  North  India 
(Delhi,  2007). 

Arches,  Pierre,  "Aspects  sociaux  de  quelques  gardes  nationales  au  debut  de  la  Revolution",  Actes 
du  congres  national  des  societes  savants  (Rouen-Caen,  1986),  pp.  255-266. 

Arfaioli,  M.,  The  Black  Bands  of  Giovanni:  Infantry  and  Diplomacy  during  the  Italian  Wars  (1526- 
1528)  (Pisa,  2005). 

Armytage,  F.F.,  Wars  of  Queen  Victoria's  Reign  183/  to  1887  (London,  1887). 
Arnold-Forster,  H.O,  The  Army  in  igo6:  A  Policy  and  a  Vindication  (London,  1906). 
Arnold-Foster,  H.O.,  Military  Needs  and  Military  Policy.  With  an  Introduction  by  Field-Marshall 

Earl  Roberts  (London,  1909). 
Asch,  R.G.,  "War  and  State-Building",  in  F.  Tallett  and  D.J.B.  Trim  (eds),  European  Warfare, 

^350-1750  (Cambridge,  2010),  pp.  322-337. 
Asquith,  S.,  The  New  Model  Army  (London,  1981). 

Athar,  Ali,  Military  Technology  and  Warfare  in  the  Sultanate  of  Delhi  (Delhi,  2006). 

Atwell,  William,  "Ming  China  and  the  Emerging  World  Economy,  c.  1470-1650",  in  Denis  Twitchett 
and  Frederick  Mote  (eds),  The  Cambridge  History  of  China,  vol.  VIII,  The  Ming  Dynasty, 
1368-1644,  pt  2  (Cambridge,  1998),  pp.  376-416. 

Atwood,  R.,  The  Hessians:  Mercenaries  from  Hessen-Kassel  in  the  American  Revolution  (Cam- 
bridge, 1980). 

Auerbach,  Inge,  and  Otto  Frohlich,  Hessische  Truppen  imAmerikanischen  Unabhdngigkeitskrieg, 
vol.  Ill  (Marburg,  1976). 

Auvray,  Michel,  Edge  des  casernes:  histoire  et  mythes  du  service  militaire  (La  Tour  d Aigues,  1998). 
Avant,  Deborah  D.,  The  Market  for  Force:  The  Consequences  of  Privatizing  Security  (New  York, 
2005). 

Axworthy,  Michael,  The  Sword  of  Persia:  Nader  Shah  from  Tribal  Warrior  to  Conquering  Tyrant 
(London  [etc.],  2006). 

Ayalon,  D.,  "Preliminary  Remarks  on  the  Mamluk  Military  Institution  in  Islam",  in  V.J.  Parry  and 
M.E.  Yapp  (eds),  War,  Technology  and  Society  in  the  Middle  East  (London,  1975),  pp.  44-58. 


642 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Ayin,  Faruk,  Osmanli  Devleti'nde  Tanzimat'tan  SonraAskere Alma Kanunlan  (1859-7914)  (Ankara, 
1994)- 

Aytar,  Osman,  Hamidiye  Ataytarmdan  Kby  Koruculuguna  (Istanbul,  1992). 

Babur-Nama  (Memoirs  ofBabur),  A.S.  Beveridge  (trans.),  from  the  original  Turki  text  of  Zahir- 
ud-din  Muhammad  Babur,  Padshah  Ghazi,  2  vols  (1921,  reprint  Delhi,  1989). 

Baer,  Marc  David,  Honored  by  the  Glory  of  Islam  (Oxford,  2007). 

Bailey,  Beth,  America's  Army:  Making  the  All-Volunteer  Force  (Cambridge,  MA,  2009). 

Bailey,  Beth,  "The  Army  in  the  Marketplace:  Recruiting  the  All-Volunteer  Force",  Journal  of 
American  History,  June  2007,  pp.  47-74. 

Bakker,  Christine,  and  Mirko  Sossai  (eds),  Multilevel  Regulation  of  Military  andSecurity  Contrac- 
tors: The  Interplay  Between  International,  European  and  Domestic  Norms  (Oxford,  2012). 

Balasubramaniam,  R.,  "A  Catalogue  of  Massive  Forge-Welded  Iron  Cannon  in  India:  Part  1", 
Journal  of  the  Ordnance  Society,  17  (2005),  pp.  67-90. 

Balcioglu,  Mustafa,  Belgelerle  Milli  Miicadele  Sirasmda  Anadotu'da  Ayaklanmalar  ve  Merkez 
Ordusu  (Ankara,  1991). 

Ballantyne,  R.M.,  Blue  lights;  or  Hot  Work  in  the  Soudan  (London,  1888). 

Ballantyne,  R.M.,  The  Settler  and  the  Savage:  A  Tale  of  Peace  and  War  in  South  Africa  (London, 
1877). 

Barat,  Amiya,  The  Bengal  Native  Infantry:  Its  Organisation  andDiscipline  (Calcutta,  1962). 
Barkan,  O.L.,  "Edirne  Askeri  Kassamina  ait  Tereke  Defterleri  (1545-1659)",  Belgeler,  3  (1968), 
P- 1-479- 

Barkan,  O.L.,  "H.  974-975  (M.  1567-1568)  Mali  bir  Yilina  ait  bir  Osmanli  Biitcesi",  Istanbul  Uni- 
versitesi Iktisat Fakultesi Mecmuasi  (IUIFM),  19  (1957-1958),  pp.  277-332. 

Barker,  T.,  "Military  Entrepreneurship  and  Absolutism:  Habsburg  Models",  Journal  of  'European 
Studies,  4  (1974),  pp.  19-42. 

Barkey,  Karen,  Empire  of  Difference:  The  Ottomans  in  Comparative  Perspective  (Cambridge, 
MA,  2008). 

Barrington,  J.T.,  England  on  the  Defensive  (London,  1881). 

Bartlett,  C.J.,  Defence  and  Diplomacy :  Britain  and  the  Great  Powers,  7875-7914  (Manchester,  1993). 
Bartlett,  T.,  "Ireland,  Empire,  and  Union,  1690-1801",  in  K.  Kenny  (ed.),  Ireland  and  the  British 

Empire  (Oxford,  2004),  pp.  61-89. 
Bartlett,  T.,  "The  Irish  Soldier  in  India,  1750-1947",  in  M.  Holmes  and  D.  Holmes  (eds),  Ireland 

andlndia:  Connections,  Comparisons,  Contrasts  (Dublin,  1997),  pp.  12-17. 
Bas,  F.  de,  Prins  Frederik  der  Nederlanden  en  zijn  tijd,  4  vols  (Schiedam,  1887-1913). 
Battaglini,  T.,  I'organizzazione  militare  del  Regno  delle  Dite  Sicilie  da  Carlo  III  all'impresa 

garibaldina  (Modena,  1940). 
Battistelli,  F,  T.  Ammendola,  and  L.  Greco,  Manuale  di  sociologia  militare:  con  elementi  di 

psicologia  sociale  (Milan,  2008). 
"The  Battle  Copper  Prints",  owned  by  Staatsbibliothek  zu  Berlin,  electronic  publication  http:// 

crossasia.org/digital/schlachten-bilder/index/english-start  (accessed  20  October  2013). 
Baumann,  Reinhard,  "Die  deutschen  Condottieri.  Kriegsunternehmertum  zwischen  eigen- 

standigem  Handeln  und  'staatlicher'  Bindung  im  16. Jahrhundert",  in  Stig  Forster  etal.  (eds), 

Ruckkehr  der  Condottieri? Krieg  und Militar zwischen  staatlichemMonopolundPrivatisierung: 

Von  derAntike  bis  zur  Gegenwart  (Paderborn,  2010),  pp.  111-125. 
Baumann,  Reinhard,  landsknechte: Ihre  Geschichte  undKulturvom  Spdten  mittelalter  bis  zum 

dreifiigjahrigen  Krieg  (Munich,  1994). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


643 


Baumann,  Reinhard,  "Protest  und  Verweigerung  in  der  Zeit  der  klassischen  Soldnerheere",  in 
Ulrich  Brockling  and  Michael  Sikora  (eds),  Armeen  und  ihre  Deserteure  (Gottingen,  1998), 
pp.  16-48. 

Bayly,  C.A.,  "Distorted  Development:  The  Ottoman  Empire  and  British  India  circa  1780-1916", 

Comparative  Studies  of  South  Asia,  Africa  and  the  Middle  East,  27,  2  (2007),  pp.  112-144. 
Beames,  Michael,  Peasants  andPower:  The  Whiteboy  Movements  and  Their  Control  in  Pre-Famine 

Ireland  (New  York,  1983). 
Beckett,  I.F.W.,  The  Amateur  Military  Tradition  7558-7945  (Manchester,  1991). 
Beckett,  I.F.W.  (ed.),  The  Army  and  the  Curragh  Incident  7974  (London,  1986). 
Beckett,  I.F.W.,  Riflemen  Form:  AStudy  of the  Rifle  Volunteer  Movementi8sg-rgo8  (Aldershot,  1982). 
Behic,  Miikellefiyet-i Askeriye Kanun-i  Muvakkatinin  Izahi  (Istanbul,  1915). 
Bein,  Amit,  "Politics,  Military  Conscription,  and  Religious  Education  in  the  Late  Ottoman 

Empire",  International  Journal  of Middle  East  Studies,  38  (2006),  pp.  283-301. 
Beldiceanu-Steinherr,  I.,  "La  conquete  dAndrinople  par  les  turcs:  la  penetration  turque  en  Thrace 

et  la  valeur  des  chroniques  ottomans",  in  Travaux etmemoires  (Paris,  1966),  vol.  I,  pp.  439-461. 
Beldiceanu-Steinherr,  I.,  "En  marge  d'un  acte  concernant  le  pengyek  et  les  aqinci",  Revue  des 

etudes  islamiques,  38, 1  (Paris,  1969),  pp.  21-47. 
Berger  Waldenegg,  C.G.,  "II  ministro  della  guerra  Cesare  Ricotti  e  la  politica  delle  riforme 

militari",  Ricerche  storiche,  1  (1991),  pp.  69-97. 
Bernoni,  D.G.,  Manuale  del  Consiglio  di  leva:  compilato  all'appoggio  delle  leggi,  regolamento, 

appendici,  circolari,  istruzioni  emanate  intorno  alreclutamento  dell'esercito  (Volterra,  1863). 
Bernstein,  Iver,  The  New  York  City  Draft  Riots:  Their  Significance  for  American  Society  and  Politics 

in  the  Age  of  the  Civil  War  (New  York,  1990). 
Bertaud,  Jean-Paul,  la  revolution  armee.  les  soldats-citoyens  et  la  Revolution  francaise  (Paris, 

1979)- 

Bertinara,  P.,  "Lo  stanziamento  dell'esercito  italiano  in  eta  liberale,  1869-1910",  in  Deputazione  di 
storia  patria  perl'Umbria  (ed.),Esercito  e  citta  dall'unita  aglianni  Trenta.  Convegno  nazionale 
distudi,  Spoleto,  77-74  maggio  7988  (Perugia,  1988),  pp.  5-19. 

Besikci,  Mehmet,  Between  Voluntarism  and  Resistance:  The  Ottoman  Mobilization  of  Manpower 
in  the  First  World  War  (Leiden,  2012). 

Bevaart,  W.,  De  Nederlandse  Defensie  (1839-7874)  (The  Hague,  1993). 

Bezzel,  Oskar,  Geschichte  des  kurpfdlzischen  Heeres  von  seinenAnfdngen  biszur  Vereinigung  von 

Kurpfalz  und Kurbayern  7777  (Miinchen,  1925). 
Bhargava,  M.L.,  Hemu  andHis  Times:  Afghans  versus  Mughals  (Delhi,  1991). 
Bhattasali,  N.K.,  "Bengal  Chiefs'  Struggle  for  Independence  in  the  Reigns  of  Akbar  andjahangir", 

Bengal  Past  and  Present,  38  (1929),  pp.  19-47. 
Biagini,  A.,  "La  riorganizzazione  dell'esercito  pontificio  e  gli  arruolamenti  in  Umbria  fra  il  1815 

e  il  1848-49",  Rassegna  storica  del Risorgimento,  61  (1974),  pp.  214-225. 
Bianchi,  Serge,  and  Roger  Dupuy  (eds),  la  Garde  nationale  entre  nation  et  people  en  armes:  mythes 

et  realites,  7789-1877  (Rennes,  2006). 
Bilgrami,  Fatima  Zehra,  "The  Mughal  Annexation  of  Sind:  A  Diplomatic  and  Military  History", 

in  Irfan  Habib  (ed.),  Akbar  andHis  India  (1997,  reprint,  Delhi,  2002),  pp.  33-54. 
Binkin,  Martin,  and  Shirley  J.  Bach,  Women  and  the  Military  (Washington,  DC,  1977). 
BirDoktorunHarpveMemleketAnilari  (Dr.  Mehmet Derv is Kuntman),  Metin  Ozata  (ed.)  (Ankara, 

2009). 

Birdal,  Mehmet  Sinan,  The  Holy  Roman  Empire  and  the  Ottomans:  From  Global  Imperial  Power 

to  Absolutist  States  (London,  2011). 
Birinci Dunya Harbinde  TurkHarbi,  vol.  I,  Osmanli Imparatorlugu'nun  SiyasiveAskeriHazirliklari 

ve  Harbe  Girisi  (Ankara,  1970). 


644 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Black,  Jeremy,  Beyond  the  Military  Revolution:  War  in  the  Seventeenth  Century  World  (Basingstoke, 
2011). 

Black,  Jeremy,  European  Warfare  7660-1815  (New  Haven,  CT,  1994). 

Black,  Jeremy,  A  Military  Revolution?  Military  Change  and  European  Society,  1550-1800  (Basing- 
stoke, 1991). 

Blanning,  T.C.W.,  The  French  Revolutionary  Wars,  1787-1802  (London,  1996). 
Bloch,  M.,  Feudal  Society,  vol.  I  (London  [etc.],  1989). 

Bodin,  Jerome,  Les  Suisses  au  service  de  la  France  de  Loius  XI  a  la  Legion  etrangere  (Paris,  1988). 
Bonald,  Opinion  de  M.  de  Ronald,  depute  de  I'Aveyron,  Sur  le  projet  de  loi  relatifau  recrutement 
de  I'armee  (Paris,  1818). 

Bosworth,  C.E.,  "Ghulam,  I:  The  Caliphate",  in  Encyclopedia  of  Islam,  2nd  edn  (Leiden,  1978). 

Bosworth,  C.E.,  "Ghulam,  II:  Persia",  in  Encyclopedia  of  Islam,  2nd  edn  (Leiden,  1978). 

Botti,  R,  "Note  sul  pensiero  militare  italiano  da  fine  secolo  XIX  all'inizio  della  prima  guerra 

mondiale.  Parte  I",  Studi  storico-militari  (1985),  pp.  11-124. 
Botti,  R,  "Note  sul  pensiero  militare  italiano  da  fine  secolo  XIX  all'inizio  della  prima  guerra 

mondiale.  Parte  II",  Studi  storico-militari  (1986),  pp.  51-208. 
Bourdeille  de  Brantome,  P.  de,  Oeuvres  completes,  L.  Lalanne  (ed.),  11  vols  (Paris  1864-1882). 
Bouthillier,  Rapport  sur  le  recrutement,  les  engagements,  les  rengagements  et  les  conges  (Paris, 

1790). 

Boynton,  L.,  The  Elizabethan  Militia,  1558-1638  (London,  1967). 
Bozon,  M.,  Les  conscrits  (Paris,  1981). 

Braker,  Ulrich,  Lebensgeschichte  und Natiirliche  Ebentheuer  des  Armen  Mannes  im  Tockenburg, 
in  Ulrich  Braker,  Lebensgeschichte  und  vermischte  Schriften,  Andreas  Biirgi  et  at.  (eds) 
(Miinchen,  2000). 

Braudel,  R,  The  Mediterranean  and  the  Mediterranean  World  in  the  Age  of  Philip  II,  2  vols  (London, 
1972-1973)- 

Brauer,  G.,  Die  Hannoversch-Englischen  Subsidienvertrdge,  1701-1748  (Aalen,  1962). 
Brewer,  John,  Sinews  of  Power:  War,  Money  and  the  English  State,  1688-1783  (London,  1989). 
Brewer,  J.,  J.  Gairdner,  and  R.S.  Brodie  (eds),  Letters  and  Papers,  Foreign  and  Domestic,  of  the 

Reign  of  Henry  VIII,  33  vols  (London,  1862-1932). 
Briante,  P.,  "L'esercitoe  le  polizie",  inU.  Levra  (ed.),  II Piemonte  alle  soglie  del  1848  (Turin,  1999), 

pp.  223-240. 

Brockling,  Ulrich,  and  Michael  Sikora  (eds),  Armeen  und  ihre  Deserteure  (Gottingen,  1998). 
Brook,  Timothy,  The  Confusions  of  Pleasure:  Commerce  and  Culture  in  Ming  China  (Berkeley, 
CA,  1998). 

Brown,  J.,  "War  and  the  Colonial  Relationship:  Britain,  India,  and  the  War  of  1914-18",  in  M.R.D. 
Foot  (ed.),  War  and  Society  (London,  1973),  pp.  85-106. 

Brown,  Keith  M.,  Bloodfeud  in  Scotland  1573-1625:  Violencejustice  and  Politics  in  an  Early  Modern 
Society  (Edinburgh,  1986). 

Brown,  Keith,  Noble  Society  in  Scotland:  Wealth,  Family  and  Culture  from  Reformation  to  Revolu- 
tion (Edinburgh,  2000). 

Browning,  0.,  Wars  of  the  Century  and  the  Development  of  Military  Science  (London,  1903). 

Bruinessen,  Martin  van,  Agha,  Shaikh  and  State:  The  Social  and  Political  Structures  of  Kurdistan 
(London,  1992). 

Brummett,  Palmira,  "Imagining  the  Early  Modern  Ottoman  Space,  From  World  History  to  Piri 
Reis",  in  Virginia  H.  Aksan  and  Daniel  Goffman  (eds),  The  Early  Modern  Ottomans:  Remapping 
the  Empire  (Cambridge,  MA,  2007),  pp.  15-58. 

Brumwell,  Stephen,  Redcoats:  The  British  Soldier  and  War  in  the  Americas,  1755-1763  (Cambridge, 
2002). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


645 


Brunsman,  Denver,  "The  Knowles  Atlantic  Impressment  Riots  of  the  1740s",  Early  American 

Studies:  An  Interdisciplinary  Journal,  5,  2  (2007),  pp.  324-366. 
Bryant,  Gerald,  The  East  India  Company  and  Its  Army,  7600-7778  (London,  1975). 
Biihrer,  Walter,  Der  Ziircher  Sotddienst  des  iS.Jahrhunderts.  Sozial-  undwirtschaftliche  Aspekte 

(Bern  [etc.],  1977). 
Bulloch,  J.M.  (ed.),  The  House  of  Gordon  (Aberdeen,  1903). 

Burbank,  Jane,  and  Frederick  Cooper,  Empires  in  World  History :  Power  and  the  Politics  ofDifference 

(Princeton,  2010). 
Burkhardt,  Johannes,  Der Dreifiigjdhrige  Krieg  (Frankfurt,  1992). 

Burnet,  Gilbert,  The  Memoires  of  the  lives  and  Actions  of  James  and  William  Dukes  of  Hamilton 

and  Castleherald  etc.  (London,  1677). 
Burschel,  Peter,  "Krieg,  Staat,  Disziplin",  Geschichte  in  Wissenschaft  und  Unterricht,  48  (1997), 

pp.  640-652. 

Burschel,  Peter,  Soldner  im  Nordwestdeutschland  des  76.  undij.Jahrhunderts  (Gottingen,  1994). 
Biisch,  Otto,  Militarsystem  und  Sozialleben  im  alten  Preufien  7773-1807  (Frankfurt  [etc.],  1981, 
first  published  Berlin,  1962). 

Caciulli,  V.,  "La  paga  di  Marte.  Assegni,  spese  e  genere  di  vita  degli  ufficiali  italiani  prima  della 

Grande  Guerra",  Rivista  di  Storia  Contemporanea,  22  (1993),  pp.  569-595. 
Caciulli,  V.,  "II  sistema  delle  scuole  militari  in  eta  liberale  (1860-1914)",  Ricerche  storiche,  23 

(1993).  PP-  533-567- 
Cadirci,  Musa,  Tanzimat  Siirecinde  Turkiye:  Askerlik  (Ankara,  2008). 
Cairnes,  W.E.,  The  Absent-Minded  War  (London,  1900). 

[Cairnes,  W.E.],  The  Army  from  within:  By  the  Author  of 'An  absent-minded  War"  (London,  1901). 
Cala  Ulloa,  G.,  Guerra  tra  Prussia  e Francia.  Considerazionipolitico-strategiche  (Florence,  1870). 
Calendar  of  Home  Office  Papers  of the  Reign  of  George  III  preserved  by  her  Majesty's  Public  Record 

Office,  ed.  Joseph  Redington  (orig  edn,  1878,  reprint,  Nendeln,  Liechtenstein,  1967). 
Callwell,  C.E.,  "Introduction",  in  Baron  von  Freytag-Loringhoven  (ed.),  A  Nation  Trained  in 

Arms  or  a  Militia?  lessons  in  War  from  the  Past  and  the  Present  (New  York,  1918),  pp.  v-xxii. 
Callwell,  C.E.,  Small  Wars:  A  Tactical  Textbookfor  Imperial  Soldiers  (London,  1896). 
Canbakal,  Hiilya,  Society  and  Politics  in  an  Ottoman  Town:  Ayntab  in  the  77th  Century  (Leiden, 

2007). 

Cannan,  Fergus,  Galloglass:  7250-7600  (Oxford,  2010). 

Canny,  Nicholas,  "Identity  Formation  in  Ireland:  The  Emergence  of  the  Anglo-Irish",  in  Nicholas 
Canny  and  Anthony  Pagden  (eds),  Colonial  Identity  in  the  Atlantic  World,  7500-7800  (Princeton, 
1987).  PP- 159-212. 

Capellen,  Joan  Derk  van  der,  Aanhetvolk  van  Nederland:  hetpatriottisch  program  uit  7787,  edited 

and  annotated  by  H.L.  Zwitzer  (Amsterdam,  1987). 
Capsali,  E.,  Seder Elyahu  Zuta,  A.  Schmuelewitz  (ed.)  (Jerusalem,  1975). 

Carafano.JamesJay,  Private  Sector,  Public  Wars:  Contractors  in  Combat- Afghanistan,  Iraq,  and 

Future  Conflicts  (Westport,  CT,  2008). 
Cardonnel,  Opinion  de  M.  le president  de  Cardonnel,  depute  du  Tarn,  Sur  le  projet  de  loi  relatifau 

recrutement  de  I'armee  (Paris,  1818). 
Casevitz,  Jean,  Une  loi  manquee:  la  loi  Niel  (7866-7868):  I'armee  francaise  a  la  veille  de  la  guerre 

de  7870  (Paris,  i960). 

Cavazza,  S.,  Piccole patrie.  Feste popolari  tra  regione  e  nazione  durante  ilfascismo  (Bologna,  2003). 
Cave,  T.S.,  and  L.  Tebbutt,  The  British  Army  and  the  Business  of  War  (London,  1896). 
Cemil,  Arif  Birinci Diinya  SavasCnda  Teskilat-i  Mahsusa,  Metin  Marti  (ed.),  2nd  edn  (Istanbul, 
n.d.). 


646 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Challener,  Richard  D.,  The  French  Theory  of  the  Nation  in  Arms,  7866-7939  (New  York,  1965). 
Chambers,  John  Whiteclay  II,  To  Raise  an  Army:  The  Draft  Comes  to  Modern  America  (New 
York,  1987). 

Chandler,  David  G.,  and  Ian  Beckett  (eds),  The  Oxford  History  of  the  British  Army  (Oxford,  1994). 
Chandra,  Satish,  Parties  and  Politics  at  the  Mughal  Court:  7707-7740  (1959,  reprint,  Delhi,  1979). 
Chattopadhyaya,  Haraprasad,  The  Sepoy  Mutiny,  7857:  A  Social  Study  and  Analysis  (Calcutta,  1957). 
Chekhovich,  O.D.,  Samarkandskie  dokumenti,  xv-xvivv  (Moscow,  1974). 

Chesney,  G.T.,  The  Battle  of  Dorking,  being  an  Account  of  the  German  Invasion  of  England,  with 
the  Occupation  of  London  and  the  Fall  of  the  British  Empire  (London,  1871,  new  edn  1914). 

Chesterman,  Simon,  and  Chia  Lehnardt  (eds),  From  Mercenaries  to  Market:  The  Rise  and  Regula- 
tion of  Private  Military  Companies  (New  York,  2007). 

Chickering,  R.,  and  S.  Forster,  Great  War,  Total  War:  Combat  and  Mobilization  on  the  Western 
Front,  7974-7978  (Cambridge,  2000). 

Childs,  John,  Armies  and  Warfare  in  Europe  7648-7789  (New  York,  1982). 

Childs.John,  The  British  Army  of  William  HI,  7689-7702  (Manchester,  1987). 

Childs,  John,  "The  Restoration  of  the  Army  1660-1702",  in  David  G.  Chandler  and  Ian  Beckett 
(eds),  The  Oxford  History  of  the  British  Army  (Oxford,  1994),  pp.  46-66. 

Churchyard,  Thomas,  The  Fortunate  Farewell  to  the  Most  Forward  and  Noble  Earl  of Essex  (London, 
!599).  m  J-  Nichols  (ed.),  The  Progresses  and  Public  Progressions  of  Queen  Elizabeth,  3  vols 
(London,  1823),  vol.  Ill,  pp.  433-437. 

Ciotti,  Bruno,  Du  volontaire  au  conscrit.  Les  levees  d'hommes  dans  le  Puy-de-Ddme  pendant  la 
Revolution frangaise,  2  vols  (Clermond-Ferrand,  2001). 

Clarke,  G.S.,  "The  German  Strategist  at  Sea",  inG.S.  Clarke  andJ.R.  Thursfield,  The  Navy  and  the 
Nation,  or  Naval  Warfare  and  Imperial  Defence  (London,  1897),  pp.  215-227. 

Clarke,  G.S.,  andJ.R.  Thursfield,  The  Navy  and  the  Nation,  or  Naval  Warfare  and  Imperial  Defence 
(London,  1897). 

Clausewitz,  C.  von,  "Vom  Kriege  (1832/34)",  in  Kriegstheorie  und  Kriegsgeschichte.  Carl  von 

Clausewitz  und Helmuth  von  Mottke,  R.  Stumpf  (ed.)  (Frankfurt  am  Main,  1993),  pp.  15-423. 
Clunas,  Craig,  "Selected  Prices  for  Works  of  Art  and  Antique  Artifacts  c.  1560-1620",  Appendix 

II,  in  Craig  Clunas,  Superfluous  Things:  Material  Culture  and  Social  Status  in  Early  Modern 

China  (Urbana,  IL  [etc.],  1991),  pp.  177-181. 
Cohen,  Eliot  A.,  Citizens  and  Soldiers:  The  Dilemmas  of  Military  Service  (Ithaca,  NY,  1985). 
Colenbrander,  H.T.  (ed.),  Gedenkstukken  der  algemeene  geschiedenis  van  Nederland  van  7795  tot 

7840, 10  vols  (The  Hague,  1905-1922). 
Colenbrander,  H.T.,  Inlijving  en  Opstand  (Amsterdam,  1941). 
Colley,  Linda,  Britons:  Forging  the  Nation,  7707-7737  (orig.  edn  1992,  London,  1996). 
Colomb,  P.H.,  et  at,  The  Great  War  of  789  [sic].  A  Forecast.  With  numerous  Illustrations  from 

Sketches  specifically  made  for  'Black  and  White'  by  Frederic  Villiers  (London,  1893,  2nd  edn, 

i895)- 

Confino,  A.,  The  National  as  Local  Metaphor:  Wurttemberg,  imperial  Germany  and  National 

Memory  7877-7978  (Chapel  Hill,  NC  [etc.],  1997). 
Connolly,  S.J.,  Divided  Kingdom:  Ireland76so-78oo  (Oxford,  2008). 

Connolly,  S.J.,  "The  Houghers:  Agrarian  Protest  in  Early  Eighteeenth-Century  Connacht",  in 
Charles  H.  E.  Philpin  (ed.),  Nationalism  and  Popular  Protest  in  Ireland  (Cambridge,  1987), 
pp.  139-162. 

Connolly,  S.J.,  Religion,  Law,  and  Power:  The  Making  of  Protestant  Ireland,  7660-7760  (Oxford, 
1992,  reprint,  2002). 

Conti,  G.,  "II  mito  della  'nazione  armata'",  Storia  contemporanea,  6  (1990),  pp.  1149-1195. 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


647 


Conway,  Stephen,  War,  State,  and  Society  in  Mid-Eighteenth  Century  Britain  and  Ireland  (Oxford, 
2006). 

Corelli,  M.,  Patriotism  or  Self-Advertisement?  A  Social  Note  on  the  War  (6th  edn,  London,  1900). 
Cornford,  L.C.,  The  Defenceless  Island:  A  Study  of  the  Social  and  Industrial  Conditions  of  Great 

Britain  and  Ireland;  and  of  the  Effect  upon  Them  of  the  Outbreak  of  a  Maritime  War  (London, 

1906). 

Corselli,  R.,  letture  educative  compilate  pei  soldati  del 5/0  reggimentofanteria  (Palermo,  1897). 
Corsi,  C,  Italia,  1870-1895  (Turin,  1896). 

Corsini,  C.A.,  "Per  una  storia  della  statura  in  Italia  nell'ultimo  secolo",  in  C.  A.  Corsini  (ed.), 

Statura,  salute  e  migrazioni:  le  leve  militari  italiane  (Udine,  2008),  pp.  9-28. 
Corvisier,  Andre,  I'armee  francaise  de  la  fin  du  XVIIe  siecle  au  ministere  de  Choiseul:  le  soldat, 

2  vols  (Paris,  1964). 
Corvisier,  Andre,  Armees  et  societes  en  Europe  de  1494  a  ij8g  (Paris,  1976). 
Corvisier,  Andre,  les  controles  des  troupes  de  lAncien  Regime,  4  vols  (Paris,  1968-1970). 
Corvisier,  Andre,  "Les  transformations  de  I'armee  au  XVIIe  siecle",  in  Maurice  Vai'sse  et  al. 

(eds),  Aux  armes,  citoyens!  Conscription  et  armee  de  metier  des  Grecs  a  nos jours  (Paris,  1998), 

pp.  78-90. 

Coss,  E.J.,  All  for  the  King's  Shilling:  The  British  Soldier  under  Wellington,  1808-1814  (Norman, 
OK,  2010). 

Cote,  A.,foseph-Michel  Cadet,  iyig-1781:  negociant  et  munitionnaire  du  roi  en  Nouvelle-France 
(Paris,  1998). 

Cotes,  K.D.,  Social  and  Imperial  life  of  Britain,  vol.  I,  War  and  Empire  (London,  1900). 
Cracraft,  James,  The  Revolution  of  Peter  the  Great  (Cambridge,  MA,  2003). 
Craig,  G.,  The  Politics  of  the  Prussian  Army  1860-1945  (Oxford,  1955). 

Crepin,  Annie,  la  conscription  en  debat  ou  le  triple  apprentissage  de  la  nation,  de  la  citoyennete, 

de  la  Republique  (ijg8-i88g)  (Arras,  1998). 
Crepin,  Annie,  Defendre  la  France:  lesfrancais,  la  guerre  et  le  service  militaire,  de  la  guerre  de 

SeptAns  a  Verdun  (Rennes,  2005). 
Crepin,  Annie,  Histoire  de  la  conscription  (Paris,  2009). 

Crepin,  Annie,  "Levees  d'hommes  et  esprit  public  en  Seine-et-Marne  de  la  Revolution  a  la  fin 

de  l'Empire  (1791-1815)"  (Ph.D.  dissertation,  Universite  de  Paris  1, 1989). 
Cress,  Lawrence  Delbert,  Citizens  in  Arms:  The  Army  and  the  Militia  in  American  Society  to  the 

War  of  1812  (Chapel  Hill,  NC,  1982). 
Crone,  P.,  Slaves  on  Horses:  The  Evolution  of  the  Islamic  Polity  (Cambridge,  1980). 
Crossley,  Pamela  Kyle,  "The  Conquest  Elite  of  the  Ch'ing  Empire",  in  The  Cambridge  History 

of  China,  vol.  IX,  The  Ch'ing  Empire  to  1800,  Willard  J.  Peterson  (ed.)  (Cambridge,  2002), 

PP-  301-359- 

Crossley,  Pamela  Kyle,  Orphan  Warriors:  Three  Manchu  Generations  and  the  End  of  the  Qing 

World  (Princeton,  1990). 
Cunningham,  LL,  The  Volunteer  Force:  A  Social  and  Political  History  i8sg-igo8  (London,  1975). 
Curtiss,  John  Shelton,  The  Russian  Army  under  Nicholas  1, 1825-1855  (Durham,  NC,  1965). 

Dai  Yingcong,  "The  Qing  State,  Merchants,  and  the  Military  Labor  Force  in  the  Jinchuan  Cam- 
paigns", late  Imperial  China,  22,  2  (2001),  pp.  35-90. 

Dai  Yingcong,  The  Sichuan  Frontier  and  Tibet:  Imperial  Strategy  in  the  Early  Qing  (Seattle  [etc.], 
2009). 

Dalberg,  J.E.E.,  Baron  Acton,  The  War  i8jo:  A  lecture  delivered  at  the  Bridgnorth  literary  and 
Scientific  Institution  on  the  25th  of  April  1871  (London,  1871). 


648 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Dale,  Stephen  R,  The  Garden  of the  Eight  Paradises:  Babur  and  the  Culture  of  Empire  in  Central 

Asia,  Afghanistan  and  India  (7483-7530)  (Leiden,  2004). 
Dallek,  Robert,  Flawed  Giant:  Lyndon  fohnson  and  His  Times,  1961-1973  (New  York,  1998). 
Dalrymple,  Campbell,  A  Military  Essay.  Containing  Reflections  on  the  Raising,  Arming,  Cloathing, 

and  Discipline  of  the  British  Infantry  and  Cavalry;  With  Proposals  for  the  Improvement  of  the 

Same  (London,  1761). 

Dalton,  J.C.,  and  W.H.  Goodenough,  The  Army  Book  for  the  British  Empire:  A  Record  of  the 
Development  and  Present  Composition  of  the  Military  Forces  and  Their  Duties  in  Peace  and 
War  (London,  1893). 

Dam  vanlsselt,  W.E.  van,  De  ontwikkeling  van  ons  krijgswezen  sedert7873  (Haarlem,  1902). 
Dancy,  Jeremiah,  "British  Naval  Manpower  During  the  French  Revolutionary  Wars,  1793-1802" 

(D.Phil.,  Oxford  University,  2010). 
Daniel,  H.  (ed.),  Callot's  Etchings  (New  York,  1974). 

Darling,  L.,  "Ottoman  Salary  Registers  as  a  source  for  Economic  and  Social  History",  Turkish 

Studies  Association  Bulletin,  4  (1990),  pp.  13-33. 
Datta,  Rajat,  "Introduction,  Indian  History  from  Eighth  to  Eighteenth  Centuries:  Problems, 

Perspectives  and  Possibilities",  in  Rajat  Datta  (ed.),  Rethinking  a  Millennium:  Perspectives 

on  Indian  History  from  the  Eighth  to  the  Eighteenth  Century,  Essays  for  Harbans  Mukhia 

(Delhi,  2008),  pp.  1-47. 

David,  Geza,  and  Pal  Fodor,  Hungarian- Ottoman  Military  and  Diplomatic  Relations  in  the  Age  of 

Suleyman  the  Magnificent  (Budapest,  1994). 
David,  Geza,  and  Pal  Fodor,  Ottomans,  Hungarians  andHabsburgs  in  Central  Europe:  The  Military 

Confines  in  the  Era  of  Ottoman  Conquest  (Leiden,  2000). 
David,  Geza,  and  Pal  Fodor  (eds),  Ransom  Slavery  along  the  Ottoman  Borders:  Early  Fifteenth 

through  Early  Eighteenth  Century  (Leiden,  2007). 
Davidson,  Ian  (ed.),  The  Davidsons  (Dingwall,  2004). 

Davies,  Brian,  "The  Foundations  of  Muscovite  Military  Power,  1453-1616",  in  Frederick  W.  Kagan 
and  Robin  Higham  (eds),  The  Military  History  of  Tsarist  Russia  (Basingstoke  [etc.],  2002), 
pp.  11-45- 

De  Amicis,  E.,  La  vita  militare:  bozzetti  (Milan,  1868). 

De  Bono,  E.,  Nell'esercito  nostra  prima  dellaguerra  (Milano,  1931). 

De  Rossi,  E.,  La  vita  di  un  ufficiale  italiano  sino  alia  guerra  (Milan,  1927). 

De  Vries,  Kelly,  "Medieval  Mercenaries:  Methodology,  Definitions  and  Problems",  in  J.  France 
(ed.),  Mercenaries  and  Paid  Men:  The  Mercenary  Identity  in  the  Middle  Ages  (Leiden,  2008), 
pp.  43-60. 

Deak,  I.,  Beyond  Nationalism:  A  Social  and  Political  History  of  theHabsburg  Officer  Corps,  7848-7378 
(New  York  [etc.],  1990). 

Del  Negro,  P.,  "De  Amicis  Versus  Tarchetti.  Letteratura  e  militari  al  tramonto  del  Risorgimento", 

in  P.  Del  Negro  (ed.),  Eserci to,  Stato,  societa-.saggidi  storia  militare  (Bologna,  1979),  pp.  125-166. 
Del  Negro,  P.,  "L'esercito  italiano  da  Napoleone  a  Vittorio  Veneto:  fattore  di  identita  nazionale?", 

in  S.  Bertelli  (ed.),  La  chioma  della  vittoria:  scritti  sull'identita  degli  italiani  dall'unita  alia 

seconda  repubblica  (Florence,  1997),  pp.  53-85. 
Del  Negro,  P.,  "Garibaldi  tra  esercito  regio  e  nazione  armata:  il  problema  del  reclutamento", 

in  F.  Mazzonis  (ed.),  Garibaldi  condottiero.  Storia,  teoria,  prassi  (Milan,  1984),  pp.  253-310. 
Del  Negro,  P.,  "Introduzione.  Militarizzazione  e  nazionalizzazione  nella  storia  d'ltalia",  in  P.  Del 

Negro,  N.  Labanca,  and  A.  Staderini  (eds),  Militarizzazione  e  nazionalizzazione  nella  storia 

d'ltalia  (Milan,  2006),  pp.  11-19. 
Del  Negro,  P.,  "La  leva  militare  in  Italia  dall'Unita  alia  Grande  Guerra",  in  P.  Del  Negro  (ed.), 

Esercito,  Stato,  societa:  saggi  di  storia  militare  (Bologna,  1979),  pp.  167-267. 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


649 


Del  Negro,  P.,  "La  professione  militare  nel  Piemonte  costituzionale  e  nell'Italia  liberale",  in  P. 
Del  Negro  and  G.  Caforio  (eds),  Ufficiali  e  societa:  interpretazioni  e  modelli  (Milan,  1988), 
pp.  211-230. 

Delia  Torre,  G.,  "Le  scuole  reggimentali  di  scrittura  e  lettura  tra  il  Regno  di  Sardegna  e  il  Regno 

d'ltalia,  1847-1883",  Le  carte  e  la  Storia,  2  (2011),  pp.  84-97. 
Dellums,  Ronald  V.,  Lying  Down  with  Lions  (Boston,  2000). 

Delmas,  Jean,  "L'armee  francaise  au  XIXe  siecle:  entre  conscription  et  tirage  au  sort",  in  Maurice 
Vai'sse  (ed.), Aux armes,  citoyens! Conscription  et armee de metier des  Grecs anos jours  (Paris, 
1998). 

Delpierre,  Opinion  de  Delpierre  (jeune),  surla  question  de  savoirs'il  est  plus  utile  a  la  Republique 

francaise  d'obliger  tous  les  citoyens  sans  exception  au  service  militaire,  que  de  les  autoriser  a 

sefaire  remplacer  dans  certains  cas  (Paris,  Ventose  an  VIII). 
Demeter,  K.,  The  German  Officer  Corps  in  Society  and  State  1650-1945  (New  York,  1965). 
Demetriades,  V.,  "Some  Thoughts  on  the  Origins  of  the  Devsirme",  in  E.  Zachariadou  (ed.),  The 

Ottoman  Emirate  (1300-1389)  (Rethymno,  1993),  pp.  23-33. 
Dennis,  P.,  and  J.  Grey  (eds),  The  Boer  War:  Army,  Nation  and  Empire  (Canberra,  2000). 
Deprez,  Eugene,  Lesvolontaires  nationaux  (1791-1793):  etude  surla  formation  et  Torganisation  des 

bataillons  d'apres  les  archives  communales  et  departementales  (Paris,  1908). 
Devenne,  Florence,  "La  garde  nationale:  creation  et  evolution,  1789-aout  1792",  Annates  historiques 

de  la  Revolution  francaise,  283  (1991),  pp.  49-66. 
Devine,  T.M.,  "Introduction",  in  T.M.  Devine  and  Rosalind  Mitchison  (eds),  People  and  Society 

in  Scotland,  vol.  1, 1760-1830  (Edinburgh,  1988),  pp.  1-8. 
Dietrich,  Richard  (ed.),  Die  politischen  Testamente  der Hohenzollern  (Koln  [etc.],  1986). 
Digby,  Simon,  "Dreams  and  Reminiscences  of  Dattu  Sarvani:  A  Sixteenth  Century  Indo-Afghan 

Soldier",  Indian  Economic  and  Social  History  Review,  2  (1965),  pp.  52-80. 
Digby,  Simon,  Sufis  and  Soldiers  in  Aurangzeb's  Deccan,  Malfuzat-1 Naqshbandiyya,  tr.  from  the 

Persian  with  an  introduction  by  Simon  Digby  (Delhi,  2001). 
Digeon,  Claude,  La  crise  allemande  de  la  pensee francaise,  1870-1914  (Paris,  1959). 
Dilke,  C,  and  H.  S.  Wilkinson,  Imperial  Defence  (London,  1892). 

Disraeli,  Benjamin,  Earl  of  Beaconsfield,  "Berlin  Treaty.  Speech  in  the  House  of  Lords,  18th 

July  1878",  in  Selected  Speeches  of  the  late  Right  Honourable  the  Earl  of  Beaconsfield,  vol.  II 

(London,  1882),  pp.  201-202. 
Dodgshon,  Robert  A.,  "West  Highland  and  Hebridean  Settlement  Prior  to  Crofting  and  the 

Clearances:  A  Study  in  Stability  or  Change?",  Proceedings  of  the  Society  of  Antiquaries  of 

Scotland,  123  (1993),  pp.  419-438- 
Donagan,  B.,  War  in  England,  1643-49  (Oxford,  2008). 
Doyle,  A.C.,  Great  Britain  and  the  Next  War  (London,  1914). 

Drevillon,  Herve,  L'impot  du  sang:  le  metier  des  armes  sous  Louis  XIV  (Paris,  2006). 
Du  Bellay,  G.,  and  M.  Du  Bellay,  Memoires,  V.-L.  Bourrilly  and  F.  Vindry  (eds),  4  vols  (Paris, 
1908-1919). 

Dubler,  H.,  Der Kampf  urn  den  Solddienst  der  Schweizer  im  18.  fahrhundert  (Frauenfeld,  1939). 
Dubois-Crance,  Discours  sur  la  force  publique  et  sur  I'organisation  des  gardes  nationales  du 

royaume  (Paris,  1790). 
Dubost,  J.-F.,  La  France  italienne  auXVle  etXVLLe  siecles  (Paris,  1997). 
Ducros,  L.,  French  Society  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  trans.  W.  De  Geijer  (London,  1926). 
Duffy,  Christopher,  The  Army  of  Frederick  the  Great  (Newton  Abbot,  1974). 
Duffy,  Christopher,  The  Army  of  Maria  Theresa  (Vancouver  [etc.],  1977). 
Dufraisse,  Roger,  Napoleon  (Paris,  1987). 


650 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Eaton,  Richard  M.,  A  Social  History  of  Deccan,  7300-1767:  Eight  Indian  Lives,  The  New  Cambridge 

History  of  India,  1.8  (2005,  reprint,  Cambridge,  2008). 
Echternkamp,  J.,  and  S.  0.  Miiller  (eds),  Die Politik  der Nation.  Deutscher Nationalismus  inKrieg 

undKrisen  (Munich,  2002). 
Egler,  Anna,  Die  Spanier  in  der  linksrheinischen  Pfalz,  7620-7632  (Mainz,  1971). 
Ehlers, Joachim,  Die  Wehrverfassung  der Stadt Hamburg  innj.  und78.Jahrhundert  (Soppard,  1966) 
Ehrenberg,  Alain,  Le  corps  militaire:  politique  et pedagogic  en  democratic  (Paris,  1983). 
Ellam,  J.E.,  "Capitalist  Patriotism  and  Its  Effects  in  South  Africa",  New  Century  Review,  8  (1900), 

pp.  281-292. 

Elliott,  Mark,  The  Manchu  Way:  The  Eight  Banners  and  Ethnic  Identity  in  Late  Imperial  China 
(Stanford,  2001). 

Elster,  Jon,  Closing  the  Books:  Transitional fustice  in  Historical  Perspective  (Cambridge,  2004). 
Ely,  CD.,  The  Road  to  Armageddon:  The  Martial  Spirit  in  English  Popular  Literature,  7870-7974 

(Durham,  NC,  1987). 
Engelen,  Beate,  Soldatenfrauen  inPreufien  (Miinster,  2005). 

Englander,  David,  "Mutinies  and  Military  Morale",  in  Hew  Strachan  (ed.),  World  War  I:  A  History 

(Oxford,  1998),  pp.  191-203. 
Erdem,  Hakan,  '"Perfidious  Albanians'  and  'Zealous  Governors:'"  Ottomans,  Albanians  and 

Turks  in  the  Greek  War  of  Independence",  in  Antonis  Anastasopoulos  and  Elias  Kolovos  (eds), 

Ottoman  Rule  and  the  Balkans,  7760-7850:  Conflict,  Transformation,  Adaptation  (Rethymno, 

2007),  pp.  213-240. 

Erdem,  Hakan,  "Recruitment  for  the  'Victorious  Soldiers  of  Muhammad'  in  the  Arab  Provinces, 
1826-1828",  in  Israel  Gershoni,  Hakan  Erdem,  and  Ursula  Wokock  (eds),  Histories  of  the  Middle 
East:  New  Directions  (London,  2002),  pp.  189-206. 

Erickson,  Edward  J.,  Defeat  in  Detail:  The  Ottoman  Army  in  the  Balkans,  7972-7975  ( Westport, 
CT,  2003). 

Erickson,  Edward  J.,  Ordered  to  Die:  A  History  of  the  Ottoman  Army  in  the  First  World  War 
(Westport,  CT,  2001). 

Errani,  A.,  Reepatria: libra  dilettura  aduso  delle  scuole  reggimentali dedicate  alsoldato  italiano 
(Treviso,  1892). 

Esmer,  Tolga,  "A  Culture  of  Rebellion:  Networks  ofViolence  and  Competing  Discourses  of  Justice 
in  the  Ottoman  Empire,  1700-1808"  (Ph.D.,  University  of  Chicago,  2009). 

Evans,  Thomas  W,  "The  All- Volunteer  Army  After  Twenty  Years:  Recruiting  in  the  Modern  Era", 
Army  History,  27  (Summer  1993),  pp.  40-46. 

Fahmy,  Khaled,  All  the  Pasha's  Men:  Mehmed  All,  His  Army,  and  the  Making  of  Modern  Egypt 
(Cambridge,  1997). 

Faivre,  Maurice,  Les  nations  armees:  de  la  guerre  des  peuples  a  la  guerre  des  etoiles  (Paris,  1988). 
Fallon,  J.  A.,  "Scottish  Mercenaries  in  the  Service  of  Denmark  and  Sweden  1626-1632"  (Ph.D. 

dissertation,  University  of  Glasgow,  1972). 
Fambri,  P.,  "La  societa  e  la  Chiesa.  A  proposito  della  nuova  legge  di  reclutamento",  Nuova 

Antologia,  10  (1875),  pp.  141-153- 
Fang  Chao-ying,  "A  Technique  for  Estimating  the  Numerical  Strength  of  the  Early  Manchu 

Military  Forces",  Harvard Journal  of  Asiatic  Studies,  13, 1/2  (1950),  pp.  192-215. 
Fann,  Willerd  R.,  "Foreigners  in  the  Prussian  Army,  1713-1756:  Some  Statistical  and  Interpretative 

problems",  Central  European  History,  23  (1990),  pp.  76-85. 
Fann,  Willerd  R.,  "On  the  Infantryman's  Age  in  Eighteenth  Century  Prussia",  Military  Affairs, 

41  (1977).  PP- 165-170. 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


651 


Faroqhi,  Suraiya  (ed.),  The  Cambridge  History  of  Turkey,  vol.  Ill,  The  Later  Ottoman  Empire, 

1603-1839  (Cambridge,  2006). 
Faroqhi,  Suraiya,  "Conflict,  Accommodation  and  Long-time  Survival:  The  Bektashi  Order  and 

the  Ottoman  State  (Sixteenth-Seventeenth  Centuries)",  in  A.  Popovic  and  G.  Veinstein  (eds), 

Bektachiyya.  Etudes sur Tordre  mystique  des Bektachis  et les groupes  relevant de Hadji Bektach 

(Istanbul,  1995),  pp.  171-184. 
Felix,  J.,  "Victualling  Louis  XV's  Armies:  The  Munitionnaires  des  Vivres  de  Flandres  et  d'Allemagne 

and  the  Military  Supply  System"  (forthcoming). 
Felix,  J.,  and  F.  Tallett,  "The  French  Experience,  1661-1815",  in  C.  Storrs  (ed.),  The  Fiscal-Military 

State  in  Eighteenth-Century  Europe  (Farnham,  2009),  pp.  147-166. 
Fenoaltea,  Stefano,  "Slavery  and  Supervision  in  Comparative  Perspective:  A  Model",/ourna/  of 

Economic  History,  44  (1984),  pp.  635-668. 
Ferguson,  James,  The  Scots  Brigade  in  the  Service  of  the  United  Netherlands  1572-7782,  3  vols 

(Edinburgh,  1899). 

Ferling,  John,  "Soldiers  for  Virginia:  Who  Served  in  the  French  and  Indian  War?",  Virginia 

Magazine  of  History  and  Biography,  94,  3  (July  1986),  pp.  307-328. 
Fermanel,  G.,  Le  voyage  d'ltalie  et  du  Levant  (Rouen,  1670). 
Ferraro,  G.,  Canti popolari  monferrini  (Turin  [etc.],  1870). 

Fichte,  Robby,  Die  Begrundung  des  Militardienstverhaltnisses  (1648-1806)  (Baden-Baden,  2010). 

Finkel,  Caroline,  Osman's  Dream:  The  History  of  the  Ottoman  Empire  (New  York,  2005). 

Fiorentino,  M.,  and  G.  Boeri,  L'esercito  delle  Due  Sicilie  (1856-1859)  (Rome,  1987). 

Fischer,  Th.A.,  The  Scots  in  Eastern  and  Western  Prussia  (Edinburgh,  1903). 

Fischer,  Th.A.,  The  Scots  in  Germany  (Edinburgh,  1902). 

Fischer,  Th.A.,  The  Scots  in  Sweden  (Edinburgh,  1907). 

Fissel,  M.C.,  English  Warfare,  1511-1642  (London,  2001). 

Flynn,  George  Q.,  Conscription  and  Democracy:  The  Draft  in  France,  Great  Britain,  and  the  United 

States  (Westport,  CT,  2001). 
Flynn,  George  Q.,  The  Draft,  1940-1973  (Lawrence,  KS,  1993). 

Fodor,  P.,  "Bir  Nasihatname  olarak  'kavanin-i  yeniceriyan'",  in  Besinci  milletlerarasi  Turkoloji 

Kongresi,  Bildiriler,  vol.  Ill,  Turk  Tarihi  (Istanbul,  1985),  pp.  217-224. 
Foerster,  R.G.  (ed.),  Die  Wehrpflicht:  Entstehung,  Formen  und  politisch-militdrische  Wirkung 

(Munich,  1994). 

Fogelman,  Aaron  Spencer,  Hopeful  journeys:  German  Immigration,  Settlement,  and  Political 

Culture  in  Colonial  America  (Philadelphia,  1996). 
Forbes,  D.,  Ane  Account  of  the  Familie  of  Lnnes  (Aberdeen,  1864). 
Ford,  E.,  and  G.C.  Home,  England  Invaded  (London,  1913). 

Forrest,  Alan,  Conscripts  and  Deserters:  The  Army  and  French  Society  during  the  Revolution  and 
Empire  (Oxford,  1989). 

Forrest,  Alan,  "The  Nation  in  Arms  I:  The  French  Wars",  in  C.  Townshend  (ed.),  The  Oxford  History 

of  Modern  War  (Oxford,  2000),  pp.  55-73. 
Forster,  S.,  "Militar  und  staatsbiirgerliche  Partizipation.  Die  allgemeine  Wehrpflicht  im 

Deutschen  Kaiserreich,  1871-1914",  in  R.G.  Foerster  (ed.),  Die  Wehrpflicht: Entstehung,  Formen 

und  politisch-militdrische  Wirkung  (Munich,  1994),  pp.  55-70. 
Forster,  S.,  "Vom  Volkskrieg  zum  totalen  Krieg?  Der  Amerikanische  Biirgerkrieg  1861-1865,  der 

Deutsch-Franzosische  Krieg  1870/71  und  die  Anfange  moderner  Kriegsfiihrung",  in  WL. 

Bernecker  andV.  Dotterweich  (eds),  Deutschland  in  den  internationalen  Beziehungen  des  19. 

undio.jahrhunderts.  Festschriftfur Josef  Becker  zum  65.  Geburtstag  (Munich,  1996),  pp.  71-92. 
Forster,  S.,  andj.  Nagler  (eds),  On  the  Road  to  Total  War:  The  American  Civil  War  and  the  German 

Wars  of  Unification,  1861-1871  (Cambridge,  1997). 


652 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Foster,  H.J.,  Organization.  How  Armies  Are  Formed  for  War  (London,  1911). 

France,  J.,  "Introduction:  Warfare  in  the  Middle  Ages",  in  J.  France  (ed.),  Mercenaries  and  Paid 

Men:  The  Mercenary  Identity  in  the  Middle  Ages  (Leiden,  2008),  pp.  1-12. 
Francia,  E.,  Le  baionette  inteltigenti.  Guardia  nazionale  nell'Italia  liberale,  7848-78/6  (Bologna, 

1999)  - 

Francioni,  Francesco,  and  Natalino  Ronzitti  (eds),  War  by  Contract: Human  Rights,  Humanitarian 

Law,  and  Private  Contractors  (Oxford,  2011). 
Franke,  Linda  Bird,  Ground  Zero:  The  Gender  Wars  in  the  Military  (New  York,  1997). 
Franz,  Giinther  (ed.),  Quellen  zur  Geschichte  des  deutschen  Bauernstandes  im  Mittelalter 

(Darmstadt,  1967). 

Fraser,  James,  Chronicles  of  the  Frasers,  William  Mackay  (ed.)  (Edinburgh,  1905). 
Fraser,  James,  The  History  of  Nadir  Shah  (1742,  reprint,  Delhi,  1973). 

Fraser,  W.  Hamish,  "Patterns  of  Protest",  in  T.M.  Devine  and  Rosalind  Mitchison  (eds),  People 

and  Society  in  Scotland,  vol.  1, 7/60-7830  (Edinburgh,  1988),  pp.  268-291. 
Fraser,  W,  Memorials  of  the  Earls  of  Haddington  (Edinburgh,  1889). 

Frattianni,  M.,  and  F.  Spinelli,  "Italy  in  the  Gold  Standard  Period,  1861-1914",  in  M.D.  Bordo  and 
A.J.  Schwartz  (eds),  A  Retrospective  on  the  Classical  Gold  Standard,  1821-1951  (Chicago,  1984), 
pp.  405-454- 

Frauenholz,  Eugen  von,  Das  Heerwesen  in  der  Zeit  des  Absolutismus  (Miinchen,  1940). 
French,  D.,  Military  Identities:  The  Regimental  System,  the  British  Army,  and  the  British  People 

c.  78/0-2000  (Oxford,  2005). 
French,  D.,  "The  Nation  in  Arms  II:  The  Nineteenth  Century",  in  C.  Townshend  (ed.),  The  Oxford 

History  of  Modern  War  (Oxford,  2000),  pp.  74-93. 
Fresne-Canaye,  Ph.  du,  Le  voyage  du  Levant,  H.  Hauser  (ed.)  (Paris,  1897). 

Frevert,  Ute,  "Dasjakobinische  Modell",  inUte  Frevert  (ed.),  Militar  und  Gesellschaft  im  79.  und 

20.  fahrhundert  (Stuttgart,  1997),  pp.  17-47. 
Frevert,  Ute,  Die  kasernierte  Nation.  Militardienst  undZivilgesellschaft  in  Deutschland  (Miinchen, 

2001). 

Frevert,  Ute  (ed.),  Militar  und  Gesellschaft  im  19.  und  20.  fahrhundert  (Stuttgart,  1997). 
Frevert,  Ute,  A  Nation  in  Barracks:  Modern  Germany,  Military  Conscription  and  Civil  Society 
(New  York,  2004). 

Frey,  Sylvia  R.,  The  British  Soldier  in  America:  A  Social  History  of  Military  Life  in  the  Revolutionary 

Period  (Austin,  TX,  1981). 
Friedberg,  A.L.,  The  Weary  Titan:  Britain  and  the  Experience  of  Relative  Decline,  (895-7905 

(Princeton,  1988). 

F[riedrich]  C[hristian]Laukhards,vorzeitenMagisters  der  Philosophic,  undjetzt  Musketiers  unter 
demvon  Thaddenschen Regiment zu Halle, Leben  und Schicksale,  von  ihm selbst beschrieben, 
und  zur  Warnung  fur Eltern  und  studierende  fiingtinge  herausgegeben,  Zweiter  Theil.  (Halle, 
1792,  reprint,  Frankfurt,  1987). 

Frost,  R.,  The  Northern  Wars:  War,  State  and  Society  in  Northeastern  Europe,  7558-7/27  (Harlow, 

2000)  . 

Fuhrer,  Hans  Rudolf,  et  al.  (eds),  Schweizer  in  "Fremden  Diensten".  Verherrlicht  und  verurteilt 
(Zurich,  2006). 

Fuller,  William  C.Jr.,  Strategy  and  Power  in  Russia,  7600-7914  (New  York,  1992). 
Furrer,  Norbert,  et  al.  (eds),  Genteferocissima.  Solddienstund  Gesellschaft  in  der  Schweiz  (75.-79. 
fahrhundert)  (Zurich,  1997). 

Gabriels,  A.J.C.M.,  De  heren  als  dienaren  en  de  dienaar  als  heer.  Het  stadhouderlijk  stelsel  in  de 
tweede  hetftvan  de  achttiende  eeuw  (Den  Haag,  1990). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


653 


Gabriels,  J.,  "Tussen  Groot-Brittannie  en  Frankrijk.  De  landstrijdkrachten  van  een  onmachtige 

mogendheid",  inJ.R.  Bruijnand  C.B.  Wels  (eds),  Met  man  en  macht.  De  militaire  geschiedenis 

van  Nederland  7350-2000  (Amsterdam,  2003),  pp.  143-178. 
Galloway,  Colin  C.,  White  People,  Indians  and  Highlanders:  Tribal  Peoples  and  ColonialEncounters 

in  Scotland  and  America  (New  York,  2008). 
Galloway,  J.A.,  and  I.  Murray,  "Scottish  Emigration  to  England  1400-1560",  Scottish  Geographical 

Magazine,  112, 1  (1996),  pp.  29-38. 
Gat,  A.,  "What  Constituted  the  Military  Revolution  of  the  Early  Modern  Period?",  in  R.  Chickering 

and  S.  Forster  (eds),  War  in  an  Age  of  Revolution,  1775-1875  (Cambridge,  2010),  pp.  21-48. 
Gebelin,  Jacques,  Histoire  des  milices  provinciales  (i688-i7gi):  le  tirage  au  sort  sous  I'ancien  regime 

(Paris,  1882). 

Geerts,  G.A.,  Samenwerking  en  Confrontatie.  De  Frans-Nederlandse  militaire  betrekkingen, 

voornamelijk  in  deFranse  tijd  (Amsterdam,  2002). 
Geiss,  James,  "Peking  under  the  Ming  (1368-1644)"  (Ph.D.  dissertation,  Princeton  University,  1979). 
Genet  Rouffiac,  N.,  and  D.  Murphy  (eds),  Franco-Irish  Military  Connections,  1590-7945  (Dublin, 

2009). 

Genty,  Maurice,  "Controverses  autour  de  la  garde  nationale  parisienne",  Annates  historiques  de 

la  Revolution francaise,  291  (1993),  pp.  61-88. 
Georgieva,  C,  "Le  role  des  janissaires  dans  la  politique  ottomane  en  les  terres  bulgares  (XVIe- 

milieu  du  XVIIe)",  Etudes  historiques,  8  (1978),  pp.  179-190. 
Giese,  Friedrich  (ed.),  Die  altosmanische  Chronik  des  Asikpasazd.de  (Leipzig,  1929). 
Giese,  Friedrich  (ed.),  Die  altosmanischen  anonymen  Chroniken  Tevarih-i  Al-i  'Osmdn,  2  vols 

(Breslau,  1922-1925). 

Gilbert,  Arthur  N.,  "An  Analysis  of  Some  Eighteenth  Century  Army  Recruiting  Records",/o«™a/ 
of  the  Society  of  Army  Historical  Register,  54,  217  (Spring  1976),  pp.  39-47. 

Gilbert,  Arthur  N.,  "Army  Impressment  during  the  War  of  the  Spanish  Succession",  The  Historian, 
35  (Aug.  1976),  pp.  689-708. 

Gilbert,  Arthur  N.,  "Charles  Jenkinson  and  the  Last  Army  Press,  1779",  Military  Affairs,  42  (1978), 
pp.  7-11. 

Gilbert,  Arthur,  "Recruitment  and  Reform  in  the  East  India  Company  Army,  i76o-i8oo",/o«™a/ 

of  British  Studies,  15, 1  (1975),  89-111. 
Giorgetti,  N.,  le  armi  toscane  e  le  occupazioni  militari  in  Toscana  (1537-1860)  (Citta  di  Castello, 

1916). 

Girard,  Georges,  Racolage  et  milice  (1701-1715)  (Paris,  1921). 

Girard,  Georges,  le  service  militaire  en  France  a  la  fin  du  regne  de  louis  XIV:  racolage  et  milice 
(Paris,  1922). 

Girardet,  Raoul,  la  societe  militaire  de  1815  a  nos jours  (Paris,  1998). 

Glete,  Jan,  War  and  the  State  in  Early  Modern  Europe:  Spain,  the  Dutch  Republic  and  Sweden  as 

Fiscal-Military  States,  1500-1660  (London,  2002). 
"Global  Collaboratory  on  the  History  of  Labour  Relations:  Results",  https://collab.iisg.nl/web/ 

labourrelations/results  (accessed  10  July  2013). 
Godineau,  Dominique,  Citoyennes  Tricoteuses:  lesfemmes  du  peuple  a  Paris  pendant  la  Revolution 

francaise  (Aix-en-Provence,  1988). 
Godwin-Austin,  A.,  An  Army  without  Conscription  (London,  1900). 

Goltz,  C.  Freiherr  von  der,  "The  Military  Lessons  of  the  South  African  War",  National  Review, 
42  (1903),  pp.  371-394- 

Gommans,  Jos,  Mughal  Warfare:  Indian  Frontiers  and  High  Roads  to  Empire,  1500-1700  (London 
[etc.],  2002). 

Goodrick,  A.T.S.  (ed.),  The  Relation  of  Sydnam  Poyntz,  1624-1636  (London,  1908). 


654 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Gordon,  Sir  Robert,  A  Genealogical  History  of  the  Earldom  of  Sutherland  (Edinburgh,  1813). 
Gordon,  Stewart,  The  Marathas:  1600-1818  (1998,  reprint,  Delhi,  2000). 

Gordon,  Stewart  N.,  "Symbolic  and  Structural  Constraints  on  the  Adoption  of  European-Style 

Military  Technologies  in  the  Eighteenth  Century",  in  Richard  B.  Barnett  (ed.),  Rethinking 

Early  Modern  India  (Delhi,  2002),  pp.  155-178. 
Gordon,  Stewart,  "Zones  of  Military  Entrepreneurship  in  India,  1500-1700",  in  Stewart  Gordon, 

Marathas,  Marauders,  and  State  Formation  in  Eighteenth-Century  India  (1994,  reprint,  Delhi, 

1998),  pp.  182-208. 

Gorganian,  Gabriel,  "Armenian  Participation  in  World  War  I  on  the  Caucasian  Front",  Armenian 

Review,  20,  3-79  (Autumn  1967),  pp.  3-21. 
Goring,  J.,  "The  General  Proscription  of  1552",  English  Historical  Review,  86  (1971),  pp.  681-705. 
Goring,  J.,  "The  Military  Obligations  of  the  English  People,  1511-58"  (Ph.D.  dissertation,  University 

of  London,  1965). 

Gose,  Frank,  "Die  brandenburgisch-preuKische  Landmiliz:  'Reserve'  des  landesherrlichen  Miles 
perpetuus  oder  Rudiment  standischen  SelbstbewuRtseins",  in  Riidiger  Bergien  and  Ralf 
Prove  (eds),  Spiefier,  Patrioten,  Revolutionare.  Militarische Mobilisierung  undgesellschaftliche 
Ordnung  in  der  Neuzeit  (Gottingen,  2010),  pp.  197-213. 

Gose,  Frank,  "Zwischen  Garnison  und  Rittergut.  Aspekte  der  Verkniipfung  von  Adelsforschung 
und  Militargeschichte  am  Beispiel  Brandenburg-PreuKen",  in  Ralf  Prove  (ed.),  Klio  in  Uni- 
form? Probleme  und Perspektiven  einer  modernen Militargeschichte  der Friihen Neuzeit  (Koln, 
1997).  PP- 109-142. 

Gradeva,  Rossitsa,  "Between  Hinterland  and  Frontier:  Ottoman  Vidin,  Fifteenth  to  Eighteenth 

Centuries",  inA.  C.  S.  Peacock  (ed.),  Frontiers  of  the  Ottoman  WorW(London,  2009),  pp.  331-351. 
Graf  Holger  Th.,  "Landesdefension  oder  'Fundamentalmilitarisierung'?  Das  hessische  De- 

fensionswerk  unter  Landgraf  Moritz  (1592-1627)",  in  Riidiger  Bergien  and  Ralf  Prove  (eds), 

Spiefier,  Patrioten,  Revolutionare.  Militarische  Mobilisierung  undgesellschaftliche  Ordnung 

in  der  Neuzeit  (Gottingen,  2010),  pp.  29-48. 
Grant,  Alexander,  Independence  and  Nationhood:  Scotland  1306-146$  (Edinburgh,  1984). 
Grant,  J.,  British  Heroes  in  Foreign  Wars,  or  The  Cavaliers  of  Fortune:  A  New  Edition  with  Coloured 

Illustrations  (London,  1873). 
Grant,  James,  Memoirs  and  Adventures  of Sir John  Hepburn  (Edinburgh,  1851). 
Gray,  Malcolm,  "The  Social  Impact  of  Agrarian  Change  in  the  Rural  Lowlands",  in  T.M.  Devine 

and  Rosalind  Mitchison  (eds),  People  and  Society  in  Scotland,  vol.  1, 1760-1830  (Edinburgh, 

1988),  pp.  53-69. 

Gregory,  A.,  "Peculiarities  of  the  English?  War,  Violence  and  Politics:  1900-1939* 'Journal  of 'Modern 

European  History,  vol.  1, 1  (2003),  pp.  44-59. 
Grewal,  J.S.,  "The  Sikh  Movement  during  the  Reign  of  Akbar",  in  Irfan  Habib  (ed.),  Akbar  and 

His  India  (1997,  reprint,  Delhi,  2002),  pp.  243-255. 
Grey,  V.,  The  land  We  love:  Our  Military  Wilderness  and  the  Way  out  of  It  (London,  1906). 
Griffin,  Patrick,  The  People  with  No  Name:  Ireland's  Ulster  Scots,  America's  Scotch  Irish,  and  the 

Creation  of  a  British  Atlantic  World  (Princeton,  2001). 
Griffith,  Robert  K.,  The  US  Army's  Transition  to  the  All-Volunteer  Force,  1968-1974  (Washington, 

DC,  1997). 

Grimeston,  Edward,  A  Generall  Historie  of  the  Netherlands  (London,  1627). 

Grofier  Generalstab  (ed.),  Die  Kriege  Friedrichs  des  Grofien,  18  vols  in  3  series  (Berlin,  1893-1913). 

Grummitt,  D.,  "The  Court,  War  and  Noble  Power  in  England,  c.  1475-1558",  in  S.  Gunn  and  A. 

Janse  (eds),  The  Court  as  a  Stage:  England  and  the  low  Countries  in  the  later  Middle  Ages 

(Woodbridge,  2006),  pp.  145-155. 
Grundlingh,  A.,  "The  Bitter  Legacy  of  the  Boer  War",  History  Today,  49, 11  (1999),  pp.  21-25. 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


655 


Guarnieri,  A.,  Otto  anni  di  storia  militare  in  Italia:  i8sg-i866  (Florence,  1868). 
Guerin,  Daniel,  La  lutte  de  classes  sous  la  Premiere  Republique  (Paris,  1968). 
Gugger,  Rudolf,  Preujiische  Werbungen  in  der Eidgenossenschaft im  iS.Jahrhundert  (Berlin,  1997). 
Guha,  Ranajit,  and  Gayatri  Spivak  (eds),  Selected  Subaltern  Studies  (New  York,  1989). 
Guhr,  Hans,  Anadolu'dan  Filistin'e  Turklerle  Omuz  Omuza,  trans,  by  Es,ref  Bengi  Ozbilen 
(Istanbul,  2007). 

Giilsoy,  Ufuk,  Osmanli  Gayrimiislimlerinin  Askerlik  Seriiveni  (Istanbul,  2000). 

Gunn,  S.,  "War  and  the  Emergence  of  the  State:  Western  Europe,  1350-1600",  in  F.  Tallett  and 

D.J.B.  Trim  (eds),  European  Warfare,  1350-7/50  (Cambridge,  2010),  pp.  50-95. 
Gunn,  S.,  D.  Grummit,  and  H.  Cool,  War,  State  and  Society  in  England  and  the  Netherlands, 

1477-1559  (Oxford,  2008). 
Giiriin,  Kamuran,  The  Armenian  File:  The  Myth  of  Innocence  Exposed  (Nicosia,  2001). 
Guy,  Alan  J.,  "The  Army  of  the  Georges,  1714-1783",  in  David  G.  Chandler  and  Ian  Beckett  (eds), 

The  Oxford  History  of  the  British  Army  (Oxford,  1994),  pp.  92-111. 
Guy,  AlanJ.,  "The  Irish  Military  Establishment,  1660-1776",  in  Thomas  Bartlett  and  Kevin Jeffery 

(eds),  A  Military  History  of  Ireland  (Cambridge,  1997),  pp.  211-230. 

Habib,  Irfan,  The  Agrarian  System  of  Mughal  India:  1556-1707  (1963, 2000, 2nd  rev  edn,  Delhi,  2010). 
Habib,  Irfan  (ed.),  Akbar  and  His  India  (1997,  reprint,  Delhi,  2002). 

Habibullah,  A.B.M.,  The  Foundation  of  Muslim  Rule  in  India:  A  History  of  the  Establishment  and 

Progress  of  the  Turkish  Sultanate  of  Delhi,  1206-go  (1961,  reprint,  Allahabad,  1976). 
Hacisalihoglu,  Mehmet,  "Inclusion  and  Exclusion:  Conscription  in  the  Ottoman  Empire  "Journal 

of  Modern  European  History,  5,  2  (2007),  pp.  264-286. 
Hagendorf  Peter,  and  J.  Peters  (eds),  Ein  Sbldnerleben  im  Dreijiigjahrigen  Krieg  (Berlin,  1993). 
Hagiwarajunpei,  "Mindai  Kaseiki  no  Daito  hanran  to  Mongoria",  Toyoshi  kenkyu,  30,  4  (1972), 

PP-  30-54,  and  31, 1  (1972),  pp.  46-81. 
Hahlweg,  Werner,  Die  Heeresreformer  der  Oranier  und  die  Antike  (Berlin,  1941). 
Haidar,  Najaf  "Disappearance  of  Coin  Minting  in  the  1580s?  A  Note  on  the  Alf  Coins",  in  Irfan 

Habib  (ed.),  Akbar  and  His  India  (1997,  reprint,  Delhi,  2002),  pp.  55-65. 
Hale,  J. R.,  War  and  Society  in  Renaissance  Europe,  1450-1620  (London,  1985). 
Hamley,  E.,  National  Defence  (London,  1889). 

Hammer,  P.E.J.,  Elizabeth's  Wars:  War,  Government  and  Society  in  Tudor  England,  1544-1604 
(London,  2003). 

Hampton,  M.,  "The  Press,  Patriotism,  and  Public  Discussion:  CP  Scott,  the  Manchester  Guardian, 

and  the  Boer  War,  1899-1902",  Historical Journal,  44, 1  (2001),  pp.  177-197. 
Hanham,  H.J.,  "Religion  and  Nationality  in  the  Mid-Victorian  Army",  in  M.R.D.  Foot  (ed.),  War 

andSociety  (London,  1973),  pp.  159-181. 
Hannabus,  S.,  "Ballantyne's  Message  of  Empire",  in  Jeffrey  Richards  (ed.),  Imperialism  andjuvenile 

Literature  (Manchester,  1989),  pp.  53-71. 
Hanne,  W.  (introduction),  Rangirrolle,  Listen  und  Extracte  ...  von  Saldern  Infanterie  Regiment 

Anno  1771  (Osnabriick,  1986). 
Hanyu  da  cidian,  haiwaiban  (Hong  Kong,  1993). 

Hardenberg,  H.,  Overzigt  der  voornaamste  bepalingen  betreffende  de  sterkte,  zamenstelling, 
betaling,  verzorging  en  verpleging  van  hetNederlandsche  leger  sedert  den  vrede  van  Utrecht  in 
1713  tot  den  tegenwoordigen  tijd,  hoofdzakelijk  op  voet  van  vrede,  2  vols  (DenHaag,  1858-1861). 

Harle,  V.,  "On  the  Concept  of  the  'Other'  and  the  'Enemy'",  History  of  European  Ideas,  19  (1994), 
pp.  27-34. 

Harries-Jenkins,  G.,  The  Army  in  Victorian  Society  (London,  1977). 

Hart,  R.C.,  Moral  Force  in  War:  Extracted  from  the  'HibbertJournaT  (London,  1909). 


656 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Hart,  R.C.,  Reflections  on  the  Art  of  War  (London,  1894). 
Hart,  R.C.,  A  Vindication  of  War  (London,  1911). 

Hartley,  Janet  M.,  Russia,  7/62-1825:  Military  Power,  the  State,  and  the  People  (Westport,  CT,  2008). 
Hartmann,  P.C.,  Geld  als  Instrument Europaischer Machtpolitik  im  Zeitalter des Merkantilismus 

(Munich,  1978). 
Hartmann,  P.C.,  Karl  Albrecht-Karl  VII  (Ratisbon,  1985). 

Hasan,  S.  Nurul,  "Aspects  of  State  and  Religion  in  Medieval  India",  in  S.  Nurul  Hasan,  Religion, 
State,  and  Society  in  Medieval  India:  Collected  Works  of  S.  Nurul  Hasan  (2005,  reprint,  Delhi, 
2009),  pp.  63-78. 

Hasan,  S.  Nurul,  "New  Light  on  the  Relations  of  the  Early  Mughal  Rulers  with  their  Nobility", 

in  S.  Nurul  Hasan,  Religion,  State,  and  Society  in  Medieval  India:  Collected  Works  ofS.  Nurul 

Hasan  (2005,  reprint,  Delhi,  2009),  pp.  111-119. 
Hasan,  S.  Nurul,  Religion,  State,  and  Society  in  Medieval  India:  Collected  Works  ofS.  Nurul  Hasan, 

Satish  Chandra  (ed.  and  intro.)  (2005,  reprint,  Delhi,  2009). 
Hasan,  S.  Nurul,  "The  Theory  of  Nurjahan  'Junta':  A  Critical  Examination",  in  S.  Nurul  Hasan, 

Religion,  State,  andSociety  in  Medieval  India:  Collected  Works  ofS.  NurulHasan  (2005,  reprint, 

Delhi,  2009),  pp.  120-134. 
Hasan,  S.  Nurul,  "Zamindars  under  the  Mughals",  in  S.  Nurul  Hasan,  Religion,  State,  and  Society 

in  Medieval  India:  Collected  Works  ofS.  Nurul  Hasan  (2005,  reprint,  Delhi,  2009),  pp.  135-150. 
Hayes,  D.,  Conscription  Conflict:  The  Conflict  of  Ideas  in  the  Struggle  for  and  against  Military 

Conscription  between  igoi  andrgsg  (London,  1949). 
Hayter,  Tony,  The  Army  and  the  Crowd  in  Mid-Georgian  England  (London,  1978). 
Heath,  Ian,  Armies  of  the  Nineteenth  Century:  Asia,  vol.  II,  China  (St  Peter  Port,  1998). 
Heijdra,  Martin,  "The  Socio-Economic  Development  of  Rural  China  during  the  Ming",  in  Denis 

Twitchett  and  Frederick  Mote  (eds),  The  Cambridge  History  of  China,  vol.  VIII,  The  Ming 

Dynasty,  1368-1644,  pt.  2  (Cambridge,  1998),  pp.  417-578. 
Heinzelmann,  Tobias,  Cihaddan  Vatan  Savunmasma:  Osmanli Imparatortugu'nda  Genet Askerlik 

Yiikumlulugu,  1826-1856,  trans,  by  Tiirkis  Noyan  (Istanbul,  2009). 
Hellie,  Richard,  Enserfment  and  Military  Change  in  Muscovy  (Chicago,  1971). 
Henderson,  D.M.,  Highland  Soldier:  A  Social  Study  of  the  Highland  Regiments  7S20-7920  (Edin- 
burgh, 1989). 

Henderson,  G.F.,  The  Science  of  War:  A  Collection  of  Essays  and  lectures  i8g2-igo3,  ed.  by  N. 

Malcolm,  with  a  Memoir  of  the  Author  by  Field  Marshal  Earl  Roberts  (London,  1905). 
Hennet,  Leon  Clement,  les  milices  et  les  troupes  provinciales  (Paris,  1834). 
Henretta,  James,  "Families  and  Farms:  Mentalite  in  Pre-Industrial  America",  William  &  Mary 

quarterly,  35,  4  (Jan.  1978),  pp.  3-32. 
Henry,  G.,  "Wild  Geese  in  Spanish  Flanders:  The  First  Generation,  1586-1610",  Irish  Sword,  17 

(1989).  PP- 189-201. 

Henry,  Phillip,  Notes  of  Conversations  with  the  Duke  of  Wellington,  1831-1851  (New  York,  1888). 
Herman,  John,  Amidthe  Clouds  and  Mists:  China's  Colonization  of  Guizhou,  1200-1700  (Cambridge, 
MA,  2007). 

Heuel,  Theodor,  Werbungen  in  der Reichsstadt Kbln  1700-1750  (Bonn,  1911). 

Hewitt,  H.J.,  The  Organization  of  War  under  Edward  III  (Manchester,  1966). 

Higgonbotham,  Don,  "The  Early  American  Way  of  War:  Reconnaisannce  and  Appraisal",  William 

&  Mary  Quarterly,  3rd  ser.,  44, 2  (April  1987),  pp.  230-273. 
Hildinger,  Erik,  Warriors  of  the  Steppe:  A  Military  History  of  Central  Asia,  500  BC  to  1700  AD  (2nd 

edn,  Cambridge,  MA,  2001). 
Hippler,  Thomas,  Citizens,  Soldiers  and  National  Armies.  Military  Service  in  France  and  Germany, 

I78g-i830  (London,  2008,  first  published  in  French,  2006). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


657 


Hippler,  Thomas,  "Conscription  in  the  French  Restoration:  The  1818  Debate  on  Military  Service", 
War  in  History,  13,  3  (2006),  pp.  218-298. 

Hippler,  Thomas,  "Les  soldats  allemands  dans  l'armee  napoleonienne  d'apres  leurs  autobiogra- 
phies: micro-republicanisme  et  decivilisation",  Revue  historique  de  la  Revolution francaise, 
348  (2007),  pp.  117-130. 

Hippler,  Thomas,  "Volunteers  of  the  French  Revolutionary  Wars:  Myths  and  Reinterpretations", 
in  Christine  Kriiger  and  Sonja  Levsen  (eds),  War  Volunteering  in  Modern  Times:  From  the 
French  Revolution  to  the  Second  World  War  (London,  2011),  pp.  23-39. 

The  History  of  India  as  told  by  its  own  Historians,  8  vols,  The  Posthumous  Papers  of  the  Late  H.M. 
Elliot,  ed.  and  continued  by  fohn  Dawson  (1867-1877,  reprint,  New  Delhi,  2001). 

Hobsbawm,  E.J.,  The  Age  of  Capital,  7848-7875  (London,  1975). 

Hobsbawm,  E.J.,  Primitive  Rebels:  Studies  in  Archaic  Forms  of  Social  Movement  in  the  7gth  and 

20th  Centuries  (Manchester,  1971). 
Hochedlinger,  Michael,  Austria's  Wars  of  Emergence  7683-7797  (London,  2003). 
Hochedlinger,  Michael,  "Rekrutierung  -  Militarisierung  -  Modernisierung.  Militar  und  landliche 

Gesellschaft  in  der  Habsburgermonarchie  im  Zeitalter  des  Aufgeklarten  Absolutismus",  in 

Stefan  Kroll  and  Kersten  Kriiger  (eds),  Militar  und  landliche  Gesellschaft  in  derfruhen  Neuzeit 

(Hamburg  [etc.],  2000),  pp.  327-375. 
Hodder,  E.,  Heroes  of  Britain  in  Peace  and  War,  2  vols  (London,  1878-1880). 
Hoerder,  Dirk,  Cultures  in  Contact:  World  Migrations  in  the  Second  Millennium  (Durham,  NC 

[etc.],  2002). 

Hogendorp,  G.K.  van,  Brieven  en gedenkschriftenvan  Gijsbert Karelvan Hogendorp,  7  vols  (The 

Hague:  Martinus  Nijhoff,  1866-1903). 
Hohrath,  Daniel,  "Der  Burger  im  Krieg  der  Fiirsten",  in  Bernhard  R.  Kroener  and  Ralf  Prove 

(eds),  Krieg  und  Frieden.  Militar  und  Gesellschaft  in  derFruhen  Neuzeit  (Paderborn,  1996), 

PP-  305-332. 

Hohrath,  Daniel,  Friedrich  der  Grojie  und  die  Uniformierung  derpreujiischen  Armee  von  7740  bis 
7786  (Wien,  2011). 

Hohrath,  Daniel,  "Uniform",  vaEnzyklopadie  der  Neuzeit,  vol.  XIII  (Stuttgart,  2011),  cols  978-980. 
Holland,  R.,  "The  British  Empire  and  the  Great  War,  1914-1918",  in  The  Oxford  History  of  the 

British  Empire,  vol.  V,  The  Twentieth  Century,  J.  M.  Brown  and  W.  R.  Louis  (eds)  (Oxford, 

!997).  PP- 114-137- 

Holm,  Torsten,  Allgemeine  Wehrpflicht.  Entstehung,  Branch  und Mifibrauch  (Miinchen,  1953). 
Holmes,  M.,  "The  Irish  and  India:  Imperialism,  Nationalism  and  Internationalism",  in  A.  Bie- 

lenberg  (ed.),  The  Irish  Diaspora  (London,  2000),  pp.  235-250. 
Holsti,  R.,  "The  Relation  of  War  to  the  Origin  of  State,  Helsinki  1913",  Suomataisen  Tiedeakatemian 

Toimituksia  -  Annales  Academiae  Scientiarum  Fennicae,  Series  B,  13  (1914),  1-313. 
Homan,  G.D.,  Nederland  in  de  Napoleontische  Tijd  7795-7875  (Haarlem,  1978). 
Hopkin,  D.M.,  Soldier  and  Peasant  in  French  Popular  Culture,  7766-7870  (Woodbridge  [etc.],  2003). 
Horsfall,  T.C.,  National  Service  and  the  Welfare  of  the  Community  (London,  1906). 
Houdaille,  Jacques,  "Le  probleme  des  pertes  de  guerre",  Revue  d'histoire  moderne  et  comtempo- 

raine,  17  (1970),  pp.  411-423- 
Houlding,  J.  A.,  Fit  for  Service:  The  Training  of  the  British  Army,  7775-7795  (Oxford,  1981). 
Houston,  R.A.,  "The  Demographic  Regime",  in  T.M.  Devine  and  Rosalind  Mitchison  (eds),  People 

and  Society  in  Scotland,  vol.  1, 7760-7830  (Edinburgh,  1988),  pp.  9-26. 
Howard,  M.,  "Empire,  Race  and  War  in  Pre-1914  Britain",  in  Hugh  Lloyd-Jones  (ed.),  History  and 

Imagination.  Essays  in  Honour  ofH.  R.  Trevor-Roper  (New  York,  1982),  pp.  340-355. 
Huang,  Ray,  7587,  A  Year  of  No  Signficance:  The  Ming  Dynasty  in  Decline  (New  Haven,  CT  [etc.], 

1981). 


658 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Huang,  Ray,  "Military  Expenditures  in  Sixteenth-Century  Ming  China",  Oriens  Extremus,  17, 
1-2  (1970),  pp.  39-62. 

Huang,  Ray,  "The  Ming  Fiscal  Administration",  in  The  Cambridge  History  of  China,  vol.  VIII,  The 
Ming  Dynasty,  7368  -  7644,  Part  2,  Denis  Twitchett  and  Frederick  W.  Mote  (eds)  (Cambridge, 
1998),  pp.  106-171. 

Huang,  Ray,  Taxation  and  Government  Finance  in  Sixteenth-Century  China  (Cambridge,  1974). 
Huangchao  tongdian  (reprint  of  1786  Shitong  edn,  Hangzhou,  2000). 

Huck,  Stephan,  Soldaten  gegen  Nordamerika.  Lebenswelten  Braunschweiger  Subsidientruppen 

im  amerikanischen  Unabhdnigigkeitskrieg  (Miinchen,  2011). 
Humann,  G.,  "Rapport  au  Roi  presentant  le  compte  general  de  l'administration  de  la  justice 

militaire  en  1833",  Collection  complete  des  lois,  decrets,  ordonnances,  reglemens  avis  du  Conseil 

d'etat,  publiee  sur  les  editions  officielles  du  Louvre,  36  (1835),  pp.  496-505. 
Hume,  M.A.S.  (ed.),  Chronicle  of  King  Henry  VIII...Written  in  Spanish  by  an  unknown  hand 

(London,  1889). 

Hume  Brown,  P.  (ed.),  Scotland  before  7700 from  Contemporary  Documents  (Edinburgh,  1893). 
Hummel,  Arthur  W.  (ed.),  Eminent  Chinese  of  the  Ch'ing  Period  (Washington,  DC,  1944). 
Huntebrinker,  Jan  Willem,  "Fromme  Knechte"  und  "Garteteufel".  Sbldner  als  soziale  Gruppe  im 

76.  und  7j.  fahrhundert  (Konstanz,  2010). 
Hussain,  Syed  Ejaz,  "Glimpses  of  Silver  Coins  of  the  Patna  Mint  and  the  growing  Trade  of  Bihar 

during  the  Mughal  Period",  in  Bhaskarjyoti  Basu  (ed.),  Explorations  in  Economic  and  Social 

History:  720o-7goo  (Kolkata,  2008),  pp.  183-194. 

Ilari,  V.,  Storia  delservizio  militare  in  Italia,  3  vols  (Rome,  1990-1992). 

Ilari,V.,P.  Crociani,  andG.  Boeri,  Storia  militare  delregno  murattiano  (7806-7875),  3  vols  (Invorio, 
2007). 

Imber,  Colin,  The  Ottoman  Empire,  7300-7650,  2nd  edn  (London,  2009). 

Inalcik,  H.,  "Ghulam.  Ottoman  Empire",  in  Encyclopedia  of  Islam,  2nd  edn  (Leiden,  1978). 

Inalcik,  H.,  "The  Socio-Political  Effects  of  the  Diffusion  of  Fire-Arms  in  the  Middle  East",  in  V.J. 

Parry  and  M.E.  Yapp  (eds),  War,  Technology  and  Society  in  the  Middle  East  (London,  1975), 

pp.  195-217. 

Ingrao,  Charles  W.,  The  Hessian  Mercenary  State.  Ideas,  Institutions  and  Reform  under  Frederick 

II  (Cambridge,  1987). 
Inonii,  Ismet,  Hatiralar,  vol.  I,  2nd  edn  (Istanbul,  1992). 

Irvine,  William,  The  Army  of  the  Indian  Moghuls:  Its  Organization  and  Administration  (1903, 
reprint,  Delhi,  1994). 

Israel,  Jonathan  I.,  The  Dutch  Republic:  Its  Rise,  Greatness  and  Fall  74/7-7806  (Oxford,  1995). 
Israel,  Jonathan,  Revolution  of  the  Mind:  Radical  Enlightenment  and  the  Intellectual  Origins  of 
Modern  Democracy  (Princeton,  2010). 

Jackson,  A.,  "Ireland,  the  Union,  and  the  Empire,  1800-1960",  in  K.  Kenny  (ed.),  Ireland  and  the 

British  Empire  (Oxford,  2004),  pp.  123-153. 
Jackson,  Peter,  "The  Mamluk  Institution  in  Early  Muslim  India",  in  Peter  Jackson,  Studies  on  the 

Mongol  Empire  and  Early  Muslim  India  (Farnham,  2009),  pp.  340-358. 
Jackson,  Peter,  "The  Mongols  and  the  Delhi  Sultanate  in  the  Reign  of  Muhammad  Tughluq 

(1325-51)",  in  Peter  Jackson,  Studies  on  the  Mongol  Empire  and  Early  Muslim  India  (Farnham, 

2009),  pp.  118-157. 

Jackson,  Peter,  "Turkish  Slaves  on  Islam's  Indian  Frontier",  in  Peter  Jackson,  Studies  on  the  Mongol 
Empire  and  Early  Muslim  India  (Farnham,  2009),  pp.  63-82. 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


659 


Jacquot,  Pierre  G.,  "Les  Bataillons  de  volontaires  en  Haute-Marne  (1791-1799)"  (Ph.D.  dissertation, 

Universite  de  Dijon,  1980). 
The  Jahangirnama:  Memoirs  ofjahangir,  Emperor  of  India,  Wheeler  M.  Thackston  (trans.,  ed. 

and  annotated)  (New  York,  1999). 
Jahr,  C,  "British  Prussianism.  Uberlegungen  zu  einem  europaischen  Militarismus  im  19.  und 

friihen20.  ]ahrhundert", Jahrbuchfiir Historische  Friedensforschung  8  (1999),  pp.  295-309. 
James,  A.,  "Warfare  and  the  Rise  of  the  State",  in  M.  Hughes  and  W.  Philpott,  Modern  Military 

History  (Basingstoke,  2006),  pp.  23-41. 
James,  Antony  Brett,  Wellington  at  Wariyg4-i8i5:A  Selection  of  His  Wartime  Letters  (London,  1961). 
James,  Francis,  Ireland  in  the  Empire  7688-77/0:  A  History  of  Ireland  from  the  Williamite  Wars  to 

the  Eve  of  the  American  Revolution  (Cambridge,  1973). 
James,  W,  "The  Moral  Equivalent  of  War",  McClure's  Magazine  35  (1910),  pp.  463-468. 
Jany,  Curt,  Geschichte  derKoniglich Preujiischen  Armee  biszum fahr  7807, 3  vols  (Berlin,  1928/1929, 

2nd  enhanced  edn  Osnabriick,  1967). 
Jany,  Curt,  "Die  Kantonverfassung  Friedrich  Wilhelms  I.",  Forschungen  zur Brandenburgischen 

und  Preujiischen  Geschichte,  38  (1926),  pp.  235-272. 
Japikse,  N,  De  geschiedenis  van  hethuis  Oranje-Nassau,  2  vols  (The  Hague,  1948). 
Jaucourt,  Opinion  de  faucourt  Sur  le  projet  de  loi  qui  met  a  la  disposition  du  Gouvernement  les 

citoyens  qui  ont  atteint  leurvingtieme  annee  depuis  lepremiervendemiaire  an  8  (Paris,  Ventose 

an  VIII). 

Jauhri,  R.C. ,Firoz  Tughluq:  7357-88  (n.d.,  reprint,  Jalandhar,  1990). 

Jeffery,  K.,  The  British  Army  and  the  Crisis  of  Empire,  797S-22  (Manchester,  1984). 

Jeffery,  K.,  Ireland  and  the  Great  War  (Cambridge,  2000). 

Jeffery,  K.  (ed.),  "An  Irish  Empire"?  Aspects  of  Ireland  and  the  British  Empire  (Manchester,  1996). 
Johnson,  G.W  (ed.),  The  Fairfax  Correspondence:  Memoirs  of the  Reign  of Charles  1, 2vols  (London, 
1848). 

Joor,  J.,  De  Adelaar  en  het  Lam.  Onrust,  opruiing  en  onwilligheid  in  Nederland  ten  tijde  van  het 
Koninkrijk  Holland  en  de  Inlijving  bij  hetFranse  Keizerrijk  (7806-7873)  (Amsterdam,  2000). 

Jourdan, Rapportfaitparjourdan  (de la Haute-Vienne)  au  nomde  la  commission  militaire,  Surle 
recrutement  de  I'armee  de  terre  (Paris,  Thermidor  an  VI). 

The  journal  of  Jeffery  Amherst:  Recording  the  Military  Career  of  General  Amherst  in  Americafrom 
7758  to  7763,}.  Clarence  Webster  (ed.)  (Chicago,  1931). 

Junqi  zeli,  1791  edn,  in  Gugong  zhenben  congkan,  Vol.  293  (Haikou,  2000). 

Junxu  zeli  (Xuxiu  siku  quanshu  edn,  reprint,  Shanghai,  2002). 

Kafadar,  C,  "Yeniceri-esnaf  Relations:  Solidarity  and  Conflict"  (unpublished  MA  dissertation, 
McGill  University,  Montreal,  1981). 

Kagan,  F.W,  The  Military  Reforms  of  Nicholas  I:  The  Origins  of  the  Modern  Russian  Army  (Bas- 
ingstoke, 1999). 

Kaiser,  Michael,  "1st  ervom  Adel?Ja.  Id  satis  videtur",  in  Franz  Bosbach  [etal.]  (eds),  Geburtoder 

Leistung?  (Miinchen,  2003),  pp.  73-90. 
Kaiser,  Michael,  Politik  und  Kriegfiihrung.  Maximilian  von  Bay  em,  Tilly  und  die  Katholische  Liga 

im  Dreifiigjahrigen  Krieg  (Miinster,  1999). 
Kaldy-Nagy,  G.,  "The  First  Centuries  of  the  Ottoman  Military  Organization",  Acta  Orientalia 

Hungarica,  31  (1977).  PP- 147-183- 
Kaldy-Nagy,  G.,  "The  Strangers  (ecnebiler)  in  the  16th  Century  Ottoman  Military  Organization", 

in  G.  Kara  (ed.),  Between  the  Danube  and  the  Caucasus  (Budapest,  1987),  pp.  165-169. 


660 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Kalin,  U.,  "Die  fremden  Dienste  in  gesellschaftsgeschichtlicher  Perspektive.  Das  Innerschweizer 

Militarunternehmertum  im  18.  Jahrhundert",  in  N.  Furrer  et  at.  (eds),  Gente ferocissima. 

Mercenariat  et  societe  en  Suisse  (XVe-XIXe  siecle)  (Zurich  [etc.],  1997),  pp.  279-287. 
Kapser,  Cordula,  Die  bayerische  Kriegsorganisation  in  der  zweiten  Hdlfte  des  Dreifiigjdhrigen 

Krieges  7635-7648/49  (Miinster,  1997). 
Karabelias,  Gerassimos,  "From  National  Heroes  to  National  Villains:  Bandits,  Pirates  and  the 

Formation  of  Modern  Greece",  in  Stephanie  Cronin  (ed.),  Subalterns  and  Social  Protest:  History 

from  Below  in  the  Middle  East  and  North  Africa  (London,  2008). 
Karateke,  Hakan  T.,  and  Maurus  Reinkowski  (eds),  Legitimizing  the  Order:  The  Ottoman  Rhetoric 

of  State  Power  (Leiden  [etc.],  2005). 
Karpat,  Kemal  FL,  Ottoman  Population,  7830-7974:  Demographic  and  Social  Characteristics 

(Madison,  WI,  1985). 

Kasaba,  Resat,  A  Moveable  Empire:  Ottoman  Nomads,  Migrants  and  Refugees  (Seattle,  2009). 
Kathasaritsagara  of  Somadeva  Bhatta,  5  vols,  trans,  by  Hirendralal  Biswas  (1975,  reprint, 
Calcutta,  1983). 

The  Kautilya  Arthasastra,  Part  II,  English  translation  with  critical  and  explanatory  notes  by 

R.P.  Kangle  (1972,  reprint,  Delhi,  1992). 
Kawagoe  Yasuhiro,  "Dai  Min  kai  ten  ni  mieru  Mindai  eijokan  no  getsuryogaku  o  megutte", 

Kyuko,  15  (1989),  pp.  37-42. 
Kawagoe  Yasuhiro,  "Sokoki  no  minsosei  ni  tsuite",  Shakai  bunka  shigaku,  13  (1976),  pp.  20-33. 
Kayali,  Hasan,  Arabs  and  Young  Turks:  Ottomanism,  Arabism,  and  Islamism  in  the  Ottoman 

Empire,  7908-7978  (Berkeley,  CA,  1997). 
Keen,  M.H.,  The  Laws  of  War  in  the  Late  Middle  Ages  (London,  1965). 

Keep.J.L.H.,  Soldiers  of  the  Tsar:  Army  and  Society  in  Russia,  7462-78/4  (Oxford  [etc.],  1985). 
Kenny,  K,  "Ireland  and  the  British  Empire",  in  K.  Kenny  (ed.),  Ireland  and  the  British  Empire 
(Oxford,  2004),  pp.  1-25. 

Kenny,  K.,  "The  Irish  in  the  Empire",  in  K.  Kenny  (ed.),  Ireland  and  the  British  Empire  (Oxford, 
2004),  pp.  90-122. 

Kent,  W.H.,  "Patriotism  or  Imperialism?",  Westminster  Review  157  (1902),  pp.  126-135. 

Kerler,  Dietrich  (ed.),  Aus  dem  siebenjahrigen  Krieg.  Tagebuch  des  preufiischen  Musketiers 

Dominicus,  ed.  by  Dietrich  Kerler  (Miinchen,  1891,  reprint,  Osnabriick,  1972). 
Khan,  Ahsan  Raza,  "Akbar's  Initial  Encounters  with  the  Chiefs:  Accident  vs.  Design  in  the  Process 

of  Subjugation",  inlrfanHabib  (ed.),Akbar  and  His  India  (1997,  reprint,  Delhi,  2002),  pp.  1-14. 
Khan,  Ghulam  Hussein,  Seir Mutaquerin  (1763,  reprint,  Calcutta,  1975). 

Khan,  Iqtidar  Alam,  "Akbar's  Personality  Traits  and  World  Outlook:  A  Critical  Reappraisal",  in 
IrfanHabib  (ed.),  Akbar  and  His  India  (1997,  reprint,  Delhi,  2002),  pp.  79-96. 

Khan,  Iqtidar  Alam,  Gunpowder  and  Firearms:  Warfare  in  Medieval  India  (New  Delhi,  2004). 

Khoury,  Dina  Rizk,  "The  Ottoman  Centre  versus  Provincial  Power-Holders:  An  Analysis  of  the 
Historiography",  in  Suraiya  N.  Faroqhi  (ed.),  The  Cambridge  History  of  Turkey,  vol.  Ill,  The 
Later  Ottoman  Empire,  7603-7839  (Cambridge,  2006),  pp.  135-156. 

Kiernan,  V.G.,  Colonial  Empires  and  Armies  (new  edn,  Montreal,  1998). 

Kiernan,  V.G.,  "Conscription  and  Society  in  Europe  before  the  War  of  1914-18",  in  M.R.D.  Foot 

(ed.),  War  and  Society  (London,  1973),  pp.  141-158. 
Kinglake,  A.W,  The  Invasion  of  the  Crimea,  vol.  VI  (London,  1881). 

Kirn,  D.,  Soldatenleben  in  Wurttemberg  7877-7974.  Zur  Sozialgeschichte  des  deutschen  Militars 
(Paderborn,  2009). 

Klein,  Janet,  "Power  in  the  Periphery:  The  Hamidiye  Light  Cavalry  and  the  Struggle  over  Ottoman 
Kurdistan,  1890-1914"  (Ph.D.  dissertation,  Princeton  University,  2002). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


661 


Kleinschmidt,  Harald,  Tyrocinium  Militare.  Militdrische  Kbrperhaltungen  unci -bewegungen  im 

Wandel  zwischen  dem  14.  unddem  18.  fahrhundert  (Stuttgart,  1989). 
Klinkert,  W.,  Hetvaderlandverdedigd.  Piannen  en  opvattingen  over deverdediging  van Nedertand 

1874-19H  (The  Hague,  1992). 
Kloosterhuis.Jiirgen,  Bauern,  Burger  und  Soldaten.  Quellen  zur  Sozialisation  des Militdrsystems 

im  preufiischen  Westfalen  1713-1803,  2  vols  (Miinster,  1992). 
Kloosterhuis.Jiirgen,  "Zwischen  Aufruhr  und  Akzeptanz:  Zur  AusformungundEinbettungdes 

Kantonsystems  in  die  Wirtschafts-  und  Sozialstrukturen  des  preuKischen  Westfalens",  in 

Bernhard  R.  Kroener  and  Ralf  Prove  (eds),  Krieg  und Frieden.  Militdr  und  Gesellschaft  in  der 

Friihen  Neuzeit  (Paderborn,  1996),  pp.  167-190. 
Knox,  MacGregor,  and  Williamson  Murray  (eds),  The  Dynamics  of  Military  Revolution,  1300-2050 

(Cambridge,  2001). 

Kocka.J.  (ed.), Burgertum  imig.Jahrhundert: Deutschland im  europaischen  Vergteich  (Gottingen, 
1995)- 

Kolff,  Dirk  H.A.,  "Chittor",  in  Encyclopaedia  of  Islam,  3rd  edn,  pt  2011-33  (Leiden  [etc.],  2011), 
PP- 133-135- 

Kolff,  Dirk  H.A.,  Grass  in  Their  Mouths:  The  Upper  Doab  of  India  under  the  Company's  Magna 

Charta,  1793-1830  (Leiden,  2010). 
Kolff,  Dirk  H.A.,  "A  Millennium  of  Stateless  Indian  History?",  in  Rajat  Datta  (ed.),  Rethinking  a 

Millennium:  Perspectives  on  Indian  History  from  the  Eighth  to  the  Eighteenth  Century,  Essays 

for Harbans  Mukhia  (Delhi,  2008),  pp.  51-67. 
Kolff,  Dirk  H.A.,  Naukar,  Rajput  &  Sepoy:  The  Ethnohistory  of  the  Military  labour  Market  in 

Hindustan,  1450-1850  (Cambridge,  1990). 
Kolff,  Dirk  H.A.,  and  H.W.  van  Santen  (eds),  De  Geschriften  van  Francisco  Pelsaert  over  Mughal 

Indie,  1627: Kroniek  en  Remonstrantie  (The  Hague,  1979). 
Kollmann,  J.,  Documenta  Bohemica  Bellum  Tricennale  Iltustrantia,  6  vols  (Prague,  1974). 
Koptas,  Rober,  "Mesrutiyet  Doneminin  Umut  ve  Umutsuzluk  Sarkacinda  Ermeni  Devrimci 

Partileri  ve  Krikor  Zohrab",  Toplumsal  Tarih,  182  (February  2009),  pp.  70-75. 
Kovacs,  A.F.,  "French  Military  Institutions  before  the  Franco-Prussian  War",  American  Historical 

Review,  2  (1946),  pp.  217-23. 
Kraus,  Jiirgen,  Das  Militdrwesen  der Reichsstadt Augsburg  (1548-1806)  (Augsburg,  1980). 
Kriegsgeschichtliche  Abteilung  des  K.  und  k.  Kriegs-Archivs,  Kriege  unter  der  Regierung  der 

Kaiserin-Konigin  Maria  Theresia:  Osterreichischer  Erbfolge-Krieg  1740-1748,  9  vols  (Wien 

1896-1914). 

Kroener,  Bernhard  R.,  "Die  Geburt  eines  Mythos  -  die  'schiefe  Schlachtordnung',  Leuthen,  5. 
Dezember  1757",  in  Stig  Forster  et  at.  (eds),  Schlachten  der  Weltgeschichte  (Munich,  2001), 
pp.  169-183. 

Kroener,  Bernhard  R.,  '"Der  Krieg  hat  ein  Loch Uberlegungen  zum  Schicksal  demobilisierter 
Soldner  nach  dem  DreiKigjahrigen  Krieg",  in  Heinz  Duchhardt  (ed.),  Der  Westfdlische Friede 
(Miinchen,  1998),  pp.  599-630. 

Kroll,  Stefan,  Soldaten  im  18.  fahrhundert zwishen  Friedensalltag  und Kriegserfahrung.  lebens- 
welten  und Kultur  in  der  kursdchsischen  Armee  1728-1796  (Paderborn  [etc.],  2006). 

Krstic,  Tijana,  Contested  Conversions  to  Islam:  Narratives  of  Religious  Change  in  the  Early  Modern 
Ottoman  Empire  (Palo  Alto,  CA,  2011). 

Krumeich,  G.,  "The  Myth  of  Gambetta  and  the  "People's  War"  in  Germany  and  France,  1871-1914", 
in  S.  Forster  and  J.  Nagler  (eds),  On  the  Road  to  Total  War:  The  American  Civil  War  and  the 
German  Wars  of  Unification,  1861-1871  (Cambridge,  1997),  pp.  641-655. 


662 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Krumeich,  G.,  "Zur  Entwicklung  der  'nation  armee'  in  Frankreich  bis  zum  Ersten  Weltkrieg",  in 

R.G.  Foerster  (ed.),  Die  Wehrpflicht: Entstehung,  Formen  unci politisch-militdrische  Wirkung 

(Munich,  1994),  pp.  133-145- 
Kiiciikyalcin,  E.,  Turna'mn  Kalbi.  Yeniceri  Yoldasligi  ve  Bektasilik,  Istanbul,  2009. 
Kuhn,  Philip  A.,  Rebellion  and  its  Enemies  in  Late  Imperial  China:  Militarization  and  Social 

Structure,  1796-1864  (Cambridge,  MA,  1970). 
Kuhn,  Philip  A.,  "The  Taiping  Rebellion",  in  The  Cambridge  History  of  China,  vol.  X,Late  Ch'ing, 

1800  to  ign,  John  K.  Fairbank  (ed.)  (Cambridge,  1978),  pp.  264-317. 
Kuhn,  Thomas  (ed.),  "Borderlands  of  the  Ottoman  Empire  in  the  19th  and  Early  20th  Century", 

[special  issue]  MIT  Electronic  Journal  of Middle  Eastern  Studies  3  (2003)  http://web.mit.edu/ 

cis/www/mitejmes. 

Kulikoff,  Allan,  The  Agrarian  Origins  of  American  Capitalism  (Charlottesville,  VA,  1992). 

Kulikoff,  Allan,  From  British  Peasants  to  Colonial  American  Farmers  (Chapel  Hill,  NC,  2000). 

Kumar,  Sunil,  "Politics,  the  Muslim  Community  and  Hindu-Muslim  Relations  Reconsidered: 
North  India  in  the  Early  Thirteenth  Century",  in  Rajat  Datta  (ed.),  Rethinking  aMillennium: 
Perspectives  on  Indian  History  from  the  Eighth  to  the  Eighteenth  Century,  Essays  for  Harbans 
Mukhia  (Delhi,  2008),  pp.  139-167. 

Kiing,  Heribert,  Glanz  undElend  der  Sbldner  (Disentis,  1993). 

Kunisch,  J.,  Fiirst  -  Gesellschaft  -  Krieg:  Studien  zur  bellizistischen  Disposition  des  absoluten 

Furstenstaates  (Cologne,  1992). 
Kunisch,  J.  (ed.),  Staatsverfassung  und  Heeresverfassung  in  der  europdischen  Geschichte  der 

fruhen  Neuzeit  (Berlin,  1986). 
Kunisch,  J.,  and  H.  Miinkler  (eds),  Die  Wiedergeburt  des  Krieges  aus  dem  Geist  der  Revolution. 

Studien  zum  bellizistischen  Diskurs  des  ausgehenden  18.  und  beginnenden  ig.Jahrhunderts 

(Berlin,  1999). 

Kiinzler,  Jacob,  In  the  Land  of  Blood  and  Tears:  Experiences  in  Mesopotamia  during  the  World 

War(igi4-igi8)  (Arlington,  MA,  2007). 
Kuroda  Akinobu,  "The  Eurasian  Silver  Century,  1276-1359:  Commensurability  and  Multiplicity", 

Journal  of  Global  History,  4  (2009),  pp.  245-269. 

La  Marmora,  A.F.,  Quattro  discorsi  del  generate  Alfonso  La  Marmora  ai  suoi  colleghi  della  Camera 

sulle  condizioni  dell'esercito  italiano  (Florence,  1871). 
La  Vaissiere,  E.  de,  Samarcande  etSamarra:  elites  dAsie  centrale  dans  lEmpire  abbasside  (Paris, 

2007). 

Labanca,  N.,  II generate  Cesare Ricotti e  la politicamilitare  italiana  dal  1884  ali88y  (Rome,  1986). 

Labanca,  N.,  "I  programmi  dell'educazione  morale  del  soldato.  Per  uno  studio  sulla  pedagogia 
militare  nell'Italia  liberale",  in  Deputazione  di  storia  patria  per  l'Umbria  (ed.),  Esercito  e  citta 
dall'unita  aglianni  Trenta.  Convegno  nazionale  distudi,  Spoleto,  11-14  maggio  ig88  (Perugia, 
1989).  PP-  521-536. 

Lacroix,  Sebastien,  Pas  un  moment  a  perdre  ou  Discours  prononce  par  le  citoyen  Lacroix  a  la 

section  de  TUnite,  dans  la  seance  du  28 juillet  (Paris,  n.d.  [1793]). 
Lampe,  Albrecht,  "Der  Milizgedanke  und  seine  Durchfuhrung  in  Brandenburg-PreuKen  vom 

Ausgang  des  16.  Jahrhunderts  bis  zur  Heeresreform  nach  1807"  (Ph.D.  dissertation,  Freie 

Universitat  Berlin,  1951). 
Lane-Poole,  Stanley,  The  Emperor  Babar  (1899,  reprint,  Delhi,  1988). 

Langewiesche,  D.,  and  G.  Schmidt(eds),F6derativeNation:DeutschlandkonzeptevonderReforma- 

tion  bis  zum  Ersten  Weltkrieg  (Munich,  2000). 
Larcher,  Maurice,  La  guerre  turque  dans  la  guerre  mondiale  (Paris,  1926). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


663 


Laveaux,  Etienne,  Rapportfaitpar Et.  Laveaux,  Surla  resolution  relative  au  recrutement  de  I'armee 

de  terre  (Paris,  Fructidor  an  V). 
Laver,  James,  British  Military  Uniforms  (London,  1948). 
Lazzerini,  L.,  In  caserma.  Memorie  d'un  bersagliere  (Vercelli,  1890). 
Le  Queux,  W.,  Invasion  of  rgro,  with  a  full  Account  of  the  Siege  oflondon  (London,  1906). 
leben  und  Thaten  eines  Preujiischen  Regiments-Tambours  (Breslau,  1810,  reprint,  Osnabriick, 

1975)- 

Lecky,  W.E.,  Moral  Aspects  ofthe  South  African  War  ([London],  1900). 
Lenman,  Bruce,  Britain's  Colonial  Wars,  1688-7/83  (London,  2001). 

Leon,  Pauline,  Adresse  individuelle  a  lAssemblee  nationale,  par  des  citoyennes  de  la  capitale 
(Paris,  1792). 

Leonhard,  J.,  Bellizismus  und  Nation.  Kriegsdeutung  und  Nationsbestimmung  in  Europa  und  den 

Vereinigten  Staaten  1750-1914  (Munich,  2008). 
Leonhard,  J.,  "Nation-States  and  Wars",  inT.  Baycroft  and  M.  Hewitson  (eds),  What  Is  a  Nation? 

Europe  1789-1914  (Oxford,  2006),  pp.  231-254. 
letters  and  State  Papers  During  the  Reign  of  King  fames  the  Sixth:  Chiefefrom  the  Manuscript 

Collections  of  Sir fames  Balfour  ofDenmyln  (Edinburgh,  1838),  Abbotsford  Club. 
Levi,  M.,  "The  Institution  of  Conscription",  Social  Science  History ,  20, 1  (1996),  pp.  133-167. 
Levi,  Margaret,  Consent,  Dissent,  and  Patriotism  (Cambridge,  1997). 

Levsen,  S.,  Elite,  Mannlichkeit  und  Krieg.  Tubinger  und  Cambridger  Studenten  1900-1919  (Got- 
tingen,  2006). 

Levy,  Jean-Michel,  "La  formation  de  la  premiere  armee  de  la  Revolution  francaise:  l'effort 
militaire  et  les  levees  d'hommes  dans  le  departement  de  l'Ain  en  1791"  (Ph.D.,  Ecole  Pratiques 
des  Hautes  Etudes  -  IVeme  section,  1979). 

Lewis,  Mark,  Sanctioned  Violence  in  Early  China  (Albany,  NY,  1990). 

Lewy,  Guenter,  The  Armenian  Massacres  in  Ottoman  Turkey:  A  Disputed  Genocide  (Salt  Lake 
City,  2005). 

Li  Dongyang,  "Zou  wei  ci  mian  en  ming  shi",  in  Li,  Li  Dongyangji  (Changsha,  1984-1985),  vol. 
II,  pp.  518-519. 

Li  Du,  Mingdai huangquan  zhengzhiyanjiu  (Beijing,  2004). 

Li  Du,  "Mingdai  mubingzhi  jianlun",  Wen  shizhe,  2  (1986),  pp.  62-68. 

Liancourt,  Opinion  sur  le  mode  de  recrutement  pour  I'armee  Par  M.  le  Due  de  Liancourt,  depute 

de  Clermont  en  Beauvoisis  (Paris,  1789). 
Liang  Fangzhong,  "Mingdai  de  minbing",  Zhongguo  shehuijingjishijikan,  5, 2  (1937),  pp.  200-234; 

reprinted  in  Wu  Zhihe  (ed.),  Mingshiyanjiu  luncong  (Taibei,  1982),  vol.  I. 
Liew  Foon  Ming,  "Tuntian  farming  of  the  Ming  Dynasty"  (Ph.D.  dissertation,  University  of 

Hamburg,  1984). 

Liman  von  Sanders,  Otto,  Five  Years  in  Turkey,  trans,  by  Carl  Reichmann  (Baltimore,  1928). 
Lin  Shiliang,  "Mingdai  caojunzhi  chutan",  in  Wenji  bianweihui  (ed.),  Gu  Cheng xianshengjinian 

jiMing  Qing  shiyanjiu  wenji  (Zhengzhou,  2005),  pp.  181-198. 
Lincoln,  Charles  Henry  (ed.),  Correspondence  of  William  Shirley  Governor  of  Massachusetts  and 

Military  Commander  in  America  1/31-1/60  (New  York,  1912). 
Linden,  Marcel  van  der,  "Who  Are  the  Workers?",  in  Marcel  van  der  Linden,  Workers  ofthe  World: 

Essays  towarda  Global  Labour  History  (Leiden,  2008),  pp.  17-38. 
Linden,  Marcel  van  der,  Workers  of  the  World:  Essays  toward  a  Global  Labor  History  (Leiden 

[etc.],  2008). 

Linebaugh,  Peter,  and  Marcus  Rediker,  The  Many-Headed  Hydra:  Sailors,  Slaves,  Commoners, 
and  the  Hidden  History  of  the  Revolutionary  Atlantic  (London,  2000). 


664 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


List-  unci  lustige  Begebenheiten  deren  Herren  Officiers  aufWerbungen  (Rostock,  1741,  reprint, 
Osnabriick,  1971). 

Liu  Jinxiang,  "Mingdai  weisuo  quewu  de  yuanyin  tanxi",  Beifang  tuncong,  5  (2003),  pp.  71-74. 
Liu  Kwang-ching  and  Richard  J.  Smith,  "The  Military  Challenge:  The  North-West  and  the  Coast", 

in  The  Cambridge  History  of  China,  vol.  XI,  Late  Ch'ing,  7800  to  7977,  Liu  Kwang-ching  and  John 

K.  Fairbank  (eds)  (Cambridge,  1980),  pp.  202-273. 
Livi,  R.,  Antropometria  militare.  Risultati  ottenuti  dallo  spoglio  deifogli  sanitarii  del  militari 

dello  classii8sg-63,  eseguito  dall'lspettorato  disanita  militare  per  ordine  del  Ministero  della 

guerra  (Rome,  1896). 
Lloyd,  EM.,  A  Review  of  the  History  of  Infantry  (London,  1908). 
Lorenzetti,  L.,  and  R.  Merzario,  llfuoco  acceso  (Rome,  2005). 

Lorge,  Peter,  The  Asian  Military  Revolution:  From  Gunpowder  to  the  Bomb  (Cambridge,  2008). 
Loriga,  S.,  Sotdats  -  Un  laboratoire  disciplinaire: I'armee piemontaise  auXVllle siecle  (Paris,  2007). 
Lot,  F.,  Recherches  sur  les  effectifs  des  armees  francaises  des  guerres  d'Ltalie  aux  guerres  de 

religion,  1494-1562  (Paris,  1962). 
Lublinskaya,  A.,  Documents  pour  server  a  Thistoire  des  guerres  civiles  en  France  (7561-65)  (Moscow, 

1962). 

Lucassen,  Jan,  "The  Other  Proletarians:  Seasonal  Labourers,  Mercenaries  and  Miners",  in 
Catharina  Lis,  Jan  Lucassen,  and  Hugo  Soly  (eds),  Before  the  Unions:  Wage  Earners  and 
Collective  Action  in  Europe,  7300-7850,  supplement  2  to  International  Review  of  Social  History, 
39  (1994),  PP- 171-194- 

Lucassen,  Jan,  and  Leo  Lucassen,  "The  Mobility  Transition  in  Europe  Revisited,  1500-1900:  Sources 

and  Methods",  LLSH Research  Papers,  46  (Amsterdam,  2010). 
Lucassen,  Jan,  Lucassen,  Leo  and  Manning,  Patrick,  Migration  History  in  World  History:  Multi- 
disciplinary  Approaches  (Leiden  [etc.],  2010). 
Lucassen,  Jan,  and  Erik-Jan  Ziircher,  "Conscription  as  Military  Labour:  The  Historical  Context", 

International  Review  of  Social  History,  43,  3  (1998),  pp.  405-419. 
Lucassen,  Jan,  and  Erik-Jan  Ziircher,  "Introduction:  Conscription  and  Resistance.  The  Historical 

Context",  in  Erik-Jan  Ziircher  (ed.),  Arming  the  State.  Military  Conscription  in  the  Middle  East 

and  Central  Asia,  1775-/925  (London  [etc.],  1999),  pp.  1-20. 
Liidtke,  Alf,  "War  as  Work:  Aspects  of  Soldiering  in  20th  Century  Wars",  in  Alf  Liidtke  and  Bernd 

Weisbrod  (eds),  The  No  Man's  Land  of  Violence:  Extreme  Wars  in  the  20th  Century  (Gottingen, 

2006),  pp.  127-151. 

Luh.Jiirgen.Anc/en  Regime  Warfare  and  the  Military  Revolution  (Groningen,  2000). 
Luh.Jiirgen,  Kriegskunst  in  Europa  7650-7800  (Koln  [etc.],  2004). 
Luo  Ergang,  Laying  bingzhi  (re-edn  Beijing,  1984;  1st  edn  Chongqing,  1945). 
Luo  Ergang,  "Qingji  bing  wei  jiang  you  de  qiyuan",  Zhongguo  shehuijingji  shijikan,  5,  2  (1937), 
pp.  236-250. 

Lupo,  S.,  "II  grande  brigantaggio:  interpretazione  e  memoria  di  una  guerra  civile",  in  W.  Barberis 

(ed.),  Annali  Storia  d'ltalia  (Turin,  2002),  pp.  463-502. 
Lynch,  Michael  (ed.),  The  Oxford  Companion  to  Scottish  History  (Oxford,  2001). 
Lynn,  John  A.,  Battle:  A  History  of  Combat  and  Culture  (Boulder,  CO,  2003). 
Lynn,  John  A.,  The  Bayonets  of  the  Republic:  Motivation  and  Tactics  in  the  Army  of  Revolutionary 

France  7797-94  (Boulder,  CO,  1996). 
Lynn,  John  A.,  "Clio  in  Arms:  The  Role  of  the  Military  Variable  in  Shaping  History",/o7(™a/  of 

Military  History,  55  (1991),  pp.  83-95. 
Lynn,  John,  "Comments  on  Mercenary  Military  Service  in  Early  Modern  Europe",  Paper  presented 

to  the  IISH  Conference  in  March  2010. 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


665 


Lynn,  John  A.,  "The  Evolution  of  Army  Style  in  Modern  West,  800-2000",  International  History 

Review,  18, 3  (1996),  pp.  505-545- 
Lynn,  John  A.,  Giant  of  the  Grand  Siecle.  The  French  Army  1610-7715  (Cambridge,  1997). 
Lynn,  John  A.,  "Revisiting  the  Great  Fact  of  War  and  Bourbon  Absolutism:  the  Growth  of  the 

French  Army  during  the  Grand  siecle",  in  E.G.  Hernan  and  D.  Maffi  (eds),  Guerray  sociedad 

en  la  monarchia  hispanica:  Politica,  estrategiay  cultura  en  la  Europa  moderna  (7500-7700),  2 

vols  (Madrid,  2006),  I,  pp.  49-74. 
Lynn,  John  A.,  Women,  Armies,  and  Warfare  in  Early  Modern  Europe  (Cambridge,  2008). 

Ma  Chujian,  "Mingdaide  jiading",  Mingshiyanjiu  zhuankan,  8  (Dec.  1985),  pp.  191-252:  reprinted 
in  Ma,  Ming  Qing  bianzhengyu  zhiluan  (Tianjin,  1994),  pp.  124-162. 

Maag,  A.,  Geschichte  der  Schweizertruppen  in  neapolitanischen  Diensten  7825-7867  (Zurich,  1909). 

The  Maathir-ul-  Umara  being  Biographies  of  the  Muhammadan  and  Hindu  Officers  of  the  Timurid 
Sovereigns  oflndiafrom  7500  to  about  7/80,  by  Nawab  Samsam-ud-Daulah  Shah  Nawaz  Khan 
and  his  son  Abdul  Hayy,  H.  Beveridge  (trans.),  revised,  annotated  and  completed  by  Baini 
Prashad,  2  vols  (1941,  reprint,  Delhi,  1999). 

Mably,  Abbe  de  (G.  Bonnot),  Des  droits  et  des  devoirs  du  citoyen  (Kell,  1789). 

MacCarthy,  Justin,  Death  and  Exile:  The  Ethnic  Cleansing  of Ottoman  Muslims,  7S27-7922  (Prince- 
ton, 1995). 

McCorry,  Helen  C,  "Rats,  Lice  and  Scotchmen:  Scottish  Infantry  Regiments  in  the  service  of 
France,  ij42-vj62"Journalofthe  Society  for  Army  Historical  Research,  vol.  74  (1996),  pp.  1-38. 

McDermott,  Joseph  P.,  "Bondservants  in  the  T'ai-hu  Basin  During  the  Late  Ming:  A  Case  of 
Mistaken  Identities",  fournal  of  Asian  Studies,  40,  4  (Aug.  1981),  pp.  675-701. 

MacDonald,  R.H.,  "A  Poetics  of  War:  Militarist  Discourse  in  the  British  Empire,  1880-1918", 
Mosaic,  23, 3  (1990),  pp.  17-36. 

Macdougall,  Norman,  "An  Antidote  to  the  English":  The  Auld  Alliance  7295-7560  (East  Linton,  2001). 

Machiavelli,  N.,  The  Art  of  War,  N.  Wood  (ed.)  (New  York,  1965). 

Macinnes,  Allan,  "Scottish  Gaeldom:  The  First  Phase  of  Clearance",  in  T.M.  Devine  and  Rosalind 
Mitchison  (eds),  People  and  Society  in  Scotland,  vol.  1,7760-7830  (Edinburgh,  1988),  pp.  70-90. 
Mack  Smith,  D.,  Mazzini  (New  Haven,  CT  [etc.],  1996). 
McKay,  D.,  Prince  Eugene  of  Savoy  (London,  1977). 

Mackillop,  Andrew,  "More  Fruitful  than  the  Soil":  Army,  Empire  and  the  Scottish  Highlands, 

7775-7875  (East  Linton,  2000). 
McNeill,  W.H.,  The  Pursuit  of  Power  (Oxford,  1982). 

Magone,  Rui,  "Die  Dichotomie  von  Zivilem  und  Militarischem  in  der  Qing-Dy  nastie",  in  Herbert 
Butz  et  al.  (eds),  Bilderfur  die  "Halle  des  Purpurglanzes":  Chinesische  Offiziersportrats  und 
Schlachtenkupfer  der  Ara  Qianlong  (7736-7735)  (Berlin,  2003),  pp.  18-23. 

Mahan,  A.T.,  "The  Influence  of  the  South  African  War  upon  the  Prestige  of  the  British  Empire", 
National  Review,  38  (1901/1902),  pp.  501-512. 

Major,  Marie-France,  "Mercenaries  and  International  Law",  Georgia fournat  of 'International and 
Comparative  law,  22  (1992),  pp.  103-150. 

Makdisi,  Ussama,  "Ottoman  Orientalism",  American  Historical  Review,  102, 3  (1997),  pp.  786-796. 

Malcolmson,  Robert  W,  life  and  labour  in  England  7700-7780  (London,  1981). 

Mallett,  Michael,  "Mercenaries",  in  M.  Keen  (ed.),  Medieval  Warfare:  A  History  (Oxford,  1999), 
pp.  209-219. 

Mallett,  Michael,  Mercenaries  and  Their  Masters:  Warfare  in  Renaissance  Italy  (London,  1974, 

republished  Barnsley,  2009). 
Mallett,  Michael  E.,  andJ.R.  Hale,  The  Military  Organization  of  a  Renaissance  State:  Venice,  7400 

to  7677  (Cambridge,  1984) 


666 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Manghi,  G.,  "Scuola  e  caserma.  L'alfabetismo  dei  coscritti  in  Italia  dall'Unita  alia  prima  guerra 
mondiale",  Annati  di  storia  moderna  e  contemporanea,  11  (2005),  pp.  141-167. 

Mann,  Michael,  The  Sources  of  Social  Power,  vol.  II,  The  Rise  of  Classes  and  Nation-States  (Cam- 
bridge, 1993). 

Marselli,  N,  Gli  avvenimenti  del  1870.  Studio  politico  e  militare  (Turin  [etc.],  1872). 

Marwitz,  Ulrich,  Staatsrason  und  Landesdefension.  Untersuchungen  zum  Kriegswesen  des 

Herzogtums  Preujien  1640-1655  (Boppard,  1984). 
Marx,  Karl,  Capital:  A  Critique  of  Political  Economy,  trans,  from  3rd  German  edn  by  Samuel 

Moore  and  Edward  Aveling  (New  York,  1906). 
Mason,  Philip,  A  Matter  of  Honour:  An  Account  of  the  Indian  Army,  Its  Officers  and  Men  (London, 

1974). 

Massobrio,  G.,  Bianco,  rosso  e grigioverde: struttura  e  ideologia  delleforze  armate  italiane  (Verona, 
1974)- 

Mastrangelo,  G.,Le  "scuole  reggimentali"  1848-1913.  Cronaca  diunaforma  diistruzione  degliadutti 
nell'Italia  liberate  (Rome,  2008). 

Matta,  Basheer  Ahmad  Khan,  SherShah  Suri:  A  Fresh  Perspective  (Karachi,  2006). 

Maude,  A.,  War  and  Patriotism  [A  Reply  to  a  Pamphlet  by  John  Bellows  entitled:  The  Truth  about 
the  Transvaal  War  and  the  Truth  about  War]  (London,  1900). 

Maude,  F.N.,  "M.  Bloch  as  a  Prophet",  National  Review,  37  (1901),  pp.  102-112. 

Maurice,  J.F.,  War.  Reproduced  with  Amendments  from  the  Article  in  the  last  Edition  of  the  En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica,  to  which  is  added  an  Essay  on  military  literature  and  a  list  of  Books 
with  brief  Comments  (London,  1891). 

May,  Timothy,  The  Mongol  Art  of  War:  Chinggis  Khan  and  the  Mongol  Military  System  (Yardley, 
PA,  2007). 

Mazzetti,  M.,  "Dagli  eserciti  pre-unitari  all'esercito  italiano",  Rassegna  Storica  del  Risorgimento, 

59  (1972),  PP-  563-592. 
Mazzonis,  F.  (ed.),  Garibaldi  condottiero.  Storia,  teoria,  prassi  (Milano,  1984). 
Melis,  G.,  la  burocrazia  (Bologna,  2003). 

Menage,  V.L.,  "Devshirme",  in  Encyclopedia  of  Islam,  2nd  edn  (Leiden,  1978). 

Menage,  V.L.,  "Sidelights  on  the  Devshirme",  Bulletin  of the  School  of  Oriental  and  African  Studies, 

18  (1956),  pp.  181-183. 
Metzger,  Jan,  Die  Milizarmee  im  klassischen  Republikanismus  (Bern  [etc.],  1999). 
Miaglia,  C.F.,  Sull'ordinamento  delleforze  militari  del  Regno  d'ltalia:  pensieri  (Ancona,  1868). 
Michael,  Franz,  "Military  Organization  and  Power  Structure  of  China  during  the  Taiping  Rebel- 
lion", Pacific  Historical  Review,  18,  4  (1949),  pp.  469-483. 
Middleton,  Richard,  "The  Recruitment  of  the  British  Army,  1755-1762",  fournal  of  the  Society  for 

Army  Historical  Research,  67  (1989),  pp.  226-238. 
Middleton,  Richard,  "A  Reinforcement  for  North  America,  Summer  1757",  Bulletin  of the  Institute 

of  Historical  Research,  41  (1968),  pp.  58-72. 
Mihailovic,  K.,  Memoirs  of  a  fanissary,  S.  Soucek  (ed.),  trans,  by  B.  Stolz  (Ann  Arbor,  1975) 

(French  translation:  Memoires  d'un  janissaire.  Chronique  turque,  M.  Balivet  (ed.),  trans,  by 

Ch.  Zaremba  (Toulouse,  2012)). 
Militargeschichtliches  Forschungsamt,  Militarische  Reformer  in  Deutschland  im  ig.  und  20. 

fahrhundert  (Potsdam,  2007). 
Military  Instructions...  (London,  1762). 

Miller,  James,  Swords  for  Hire:  The  Scottish  Mercenary  (Edinburgh,  2007). 
Miller,  Kerby,  Emigrants  and  Exiles:  Ireland  and  the  Irish  Exodus  to  North  America  (New  York, 
1985)- 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


667 


Ming  Taizu  shilu  (facsimile  reproduction  of  Guoli  Beiping  tushuguan  cang  hongge  chaoben) 
(Taibei,  1961-1966). 

Ministero  della  Guerra,  Quarta  relazione  della  Commissione  d'inchiesta  per  I'esercito  (Legge  6 

giugno  rgoy,  n.  287)  (Rome,  1909). 
Ministero  della  Guerra,  Regolamento  di  disciplina  militare  del  7.  dicembre  7872  con  cenno  delle 

varianti  e  degli  schiarimenti  emanati  dal  Ministero  della  Guerra  a  tutto  agosto  7885  (Rome, 

1885). 

Ministero  della  Guerra,  Regolamento  di  disciplina  militare  e  di  istruzione  e  servizio  interna  per 

lafanteria  (Turin,  1859). 
Minkov,  Anton,  Conversion  to  Islam  in  the  Balkan:  Kisve  Bahas7  Petitions  and  Ottoman  Social 

Life,  7670-7/30  (Leiden,  2004). 
Minniti,  R,  "Preparazione  ed  iniziativa.  II  programma  di  Luigi  Mezzacapo  (1878-1881)",  in  F. 

Minniti  (ed.),  Esercito  e  politica  da  porta  Pia  alia  Triplice  Alleanza  (Rome,  1984),  pp.  69-88. 
Mitchell,  B.R.,  British  Historical  Statistics  (Cambridge,  1988). 

Mittelstadt,  Jennifer,  "The  Army  Is  a  Service,  Not  a  Job':  Unionization,  Employment  and  the 
Meaning  of  Military  Service  in  the  Late  Twentieth- Century  United  States",  International 
Labor  and  Working- Class  History,  80  (2011),  pp.  29-52. 

Mjoset,  Lars,  and  Stephen  Van  Holde,  "Killing  for  the  State,  Dying  for  the  Nation:  An  Introduc- 
tory Essay  on  the  Life  Cycle  of  Conscription  into  Europe's  Armed  Forces",  in  Lars  Mjoset 
and  Stephen  Van  Holde  (eds),  The  Comparative  Study  of  Conscription  in  the  Armed  Forces 
(Amsterdam,  2002),  pp.  3-94. 

Mokyr,  Joel,  Why  Ireland  Starved:  A  Quantitative  and  Analytical  History  of  the  Irish  Economy, 
7800-7850  (London,  1983). 

Molfese,  R,  "Lo  scioglimento  dell'esercito  meridionale  garibaldino  (1860-1861)",  Nuova  rivista 
storica,  44  (i960),  pp.  1-53. 

Moller,  Hans-Michael,  Das  Regiment  der  Landsknechte.  Untersuchungen  zu  Verfassung,  Recht 
und  Selbstverstdndnis  in  deutschen  Sbldnerheeren  des  76.fahrhunderts  (Wiesbaden,  1976). 

Moltke,  Helmuth  von,  "Speech  in  the  Reichstag,  14th  May  1890",  in  R.  Stumpf  (ed.),Kriegstheorie 
und  Kriegsgeschichte.  Carl  von  Clausewitz  und  Helmuth  von  Moltke  (Frankfurt  am  Main, 
1993).  PP-  504-506. 

Mondini,  M.,  "Esercito  e  Nazione.  II  ruolo  dei  militari  nel  processo  di  nazionalizzazione  fino 
alia  Grande  Guerra",  QuadernidellaSocietaltalianadiStoriaMilitare  (1996-1997),  pp.  103-163. 

Mondini,  M.,  "La  nazione  di  Marte.  Esercito  e  nation  building  nell'Italia  unita",  Storica,  20-21 
(2001),  pp.  209-246. 

Monro,  Robert,  Monro  His  Expeditionwith  the  Worthy  Scots  Regiment  (Called  Mac-Keyes  Regiment) 

Levied  in  August  7626  (London,  1637). 
Monteilhet,  Joseph,  Les  institutions  militaires  de  la  France  (7874-7832)  (Paris,  1932). 
Monti,  R,  Osservazioni sulla  legge  7  luglio  7866  relativa  alia  affrancazione  dal  militare  servizio  e 

riassoldamento  con  premio  dei  militari  (Turin,  1866). 
Moon,  David,  The  Russian  Peasantry  1600-7930;  The  World  the  Peasants  Made  (London,  1999). 
Moor,  J.A.  de,  and  H.Ph.  Vogel,  Duizend  miljoen  maal  vervloekt  land.  De  Hollandse  Brigade  in 

Spanje  7808-7873  (Amsterdam,  1991). 
Moosvi,  Shireen,  "Ecology,  Population  Distribution,  and  Settlement  Pattern  in  Mughal  India", 

in  Shireen  Moosvi,  People,  Taxation,  and  Trade  in  Mughal  India  (2008,  reprint,  Delhi,  2010), 

pp.  89-102. 

Moosvi,  Shireen,  "An  Estimate  of  Revenues  of  the  Deccan  Kingdoms,  1591",  in  Irfan  Habib  (ed.), 
Akbar  and  His  India  (1997,  reprint,  Delhi,  2002),  pp.  288-293. 


668 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Moosvi,  Shireen,  "Expenditure  on  Buildings  on  under  Shah  Jahan:  A  Chapter  of  Imperial 

Financial  History",  in  Shireen  Moosvi,  People,  Taxation,  and  Trade  in  Mughal  India  (2008, 

reprint,  Delhi,  2010),  pp.  199-212. 
Moosvi,  Shireen,  "The  Indian  Economic  Experience  1600-1900:  A  Quantitative  Study",  in  Shireen 

Moosvi,  People,  Taxation,  and  Trade  in  Mughal  India  (2008,  reprint,  Delhi,  2010),  pp.  1-34. 
Moosvi,  Shireen,  "The  Mughal  Empire  and  Deccan:  Economic  Factors  and  Consequences",  in 

Shireen  Moosvi,  People,  Taxation,  and  Trade  in  Mughal  India  (2008,  reprint,  Delhi,  2010), 

pp.  213-228. 

Moosvi,  Shireen,  "Scarcities,  Prices,  and  Exploitation:  'The  Agrarian  Crisis'  1658-70",  in  Shireen 
Moosvi,  People,  Taxation,  and  Trade  in  Mughal  India  (2008,  reprint,  Delhi,  2010),  pp.  229-242. 

Moosvi,  Shireen,  "The  Silver  Influx,  Money  Supply,  Prices  and  Revenue-Extraction  in  Mughal 
India",  in  Shireen  Moosvi,  People,  Taxation,  and  Trade  in  Mughal  India  (2008,  reprint,  Delhi, 
2010),  pp.  35-80. 

Moosvi,  Shireen,  "Urban  Population  in  Pre-Colonial  India",  in  Shireen  Moosvi,  People,  Taxation, 

and  Trade  in  Mughal  India  (2008,  reprint,  Delhi,  2010),  pp.  119-134. 
Moran,  D.,  and  A.  Waldron  (eds),  The  People  in  Arms:  Military  Myth  and  National  Mobilization 

since  the  French  Revolution  (Cambridge,  2003). 
Morden,  Bettie  J.,  The  Women's  Army  Corps,  1945-1978  (Washington,  DC,  1990). 
Morohoshi  Kenji,  "Mindai  Ryoto  no  gunton  ni  kansuru  ichi  kosatsu",  in  Mindaishi  ronso 

henshuiinkai  (ed.),  Yamane  Yukio  kyoju  taikyu  kinen  Mindaishi  ronso  (Tokyo,  1990),  pp.  165- 

186. 

Morohoshi  Kenji,  "Ryoto  heihen  to  Ro  Kei",  Toyo  daigaku  bungakubu  kiyo,  shigakka  hen,  18 
(1993).  PP-  76-104. 

[Moser,  Johann  Jacob],  Abhandtung  von  Noethigung  derer  Unterthanen  zu  regulairen  Kriegs- 
Diensten  (n.p.,  1765). 

Moskos,  Charles  C,  and  John  Sibley  Butler,  All  That  We  Can  Be:  Black  leadership  and  Racial 

Integration  the  Army  Way  (New  York,  1996). 
Mote,  Frederick,  "The  T'u-mu  Incident  of  1449",  in  Frank  A.  Kierman  and  John  K.  Fairbank  (eds), 

Chinese  Ways  in  Warfare  (Cambridge,  MA,  1974),  pp.  243-272. 
Motley,  J.L.,  A  History  of  the  United  Netherlands,  4  vols  (Edinburgh,  i860). 
Muchembled,  Robert,  la  violence  au  village:  sociabilite  et  comportements  populaires  en  Artois 

duXVe  au  XVIIe  siecle  (Paris,  1989). 
Muenger,  E.A.,  The  British  Military  Dilemma  in  Ireland:  Occupation  Politics  1886-1914  (Lawrence, 

KS,  1991). 

Miihlman,  Carl,  Imparatorlugun  Sonu,  1914:  Osmanli  Savasa  Neden  ve  Nasd  Girdi?,  trans,  by 

Kadir  Kon  (Istanbul,  2009). 
Muller,  J.A.,  The  letters  of  Stephen  Gardiner  (Cambridge,  1933). 

Miiller,  Johann  Conrad,  Der  wohl  exercirte  Preujiische  Soldat  (Schaffhausen,  1759,  reprint, 
Osnabriick,  1978). 

Miinkler,  H.,  Uber  den  Krieg.  Stationen  der  Kriegsgeschichte  im  Spiegel  ihrer  theoretischen 

Reflexion  (2nd  edn,  Weilerswist,  2003). 
Murdoch,  Steve,  "Introduction",  in  Steve  Murdoch  (ed.),  Scotland  and  the  Thirty  Years'  War 

1618- 1648  (Leiden,  2001),  pp.  1-23. 
Murdoch,  Steve  (ed.),  Scotland  and  the  Thirty  Years  War  1618-1648  (Leiden  [etc.],  2001). 
Murphey,  Rhoads,  "Ottoman  Military  Organisation  in  South-Eastern  Europe,  c.  1420-1720",  in 

F.  Tallett  and  D.J.B.  Trim  (eds),  European  Warfare,  1350-1/50  (Cambridge,  2010),  pp.  135-158. 
Murphey,  Rhoads,  Ottoman  Warfare,  1500-1700  (London,  1999). 
Murphey,  Rhoads,  "Yeni  ceri",  in  Encyclopedia  of  Islam,  2nd  edn  (Leiden,  1978). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


669 


Murtagh,  Harman,  "Irish  Soldiers  Abroad,  1600-1800",  in  Thomas  Bartlett  and  Keith  Jeffery  (eds), 

A  Military  History  of  Ireland  (Cambridge,  1996),  pp.  294-314. 
Muth,  Jorg,  Flucht  aus  clem  militarischen  Atltag  (Freiburg,  2003). 
Mutlu,  Cengiz,  Birinci Diinya  Savasi'ndaAmele  Taburlari,  7974-7978  (Istanbul,  2007). 

Nagata,  Yuzo,  Muhsinzade  MehmedPasa  ve  Ayanlik  Miiessessi  (Tokyo,  1976). 
Napoleon  III,  Projetde  loisurle  recrutement  de  I'armee  (Arras,  1843). 

Naquin,  Susan,  and  Evelyn  S.  Rawski,  Chinese  Society  in  the  Eighteenth  Century  (New  Haven, 
CT,  1987). 

Naumann,  Rolf,  Das  kursachsische  Defensionswerk  (7673  bis  7/09)  (Leipzig,  1917). 
Navereau,  A.,  Le  logement  et  les  ustensiles  des  gens  de  guerres  de  7439  a  7/89  (Poitiers,  1924). 
Niamatullah,  Niamatullah's  History  of  the  Afghans,  Part  I  (Santiniketan,  1958). 
Nickle,  B.H.,  The  Military  Reforms  of  Prince  Maurice  of  Orange  (Ann  Arbor,  1984). 
Nigra,  C,  Canti popolari  del Piemonte  (Turin,  1967). 

Nimick,  Thomas,  "Ch'i  Chi-kuang  and  I-wu  County",  Ming  Studies,  34  (July  1995),  pp.  17-29. 
Nimwegen,  Olafvan,  "Deser  landen  crijchsvolck".  HetStaatse  legeren  de  militaire  revoluties  7588- 

7688  (Amsterdam,  2006)  (English  translation,  The  Dutch  Army  and  the  Military  Revolutions 

7588-7688  (Woodbridge,  2010)). 
Nimwegen,  Olaf  van,  The  Dutch  Army  and  the  Military  Revolutions  7588-7688  (Woodbridge,  2010, 

first  published  in  Dutch,  Amsterdam  2006). 
Nimwegen,  Olafvan,  De  RepubliekderVerenigde  Nederlanden  als  grotemogendheid.  Buitenlandse 

politiek  en  oorlogvoering  in  de  eerste  helft  van  de  achttiende  eeuw  en  in  het  bijzonder  tijdens 

de  Oostenrijkse  Successieoorlog  (7740-7748)  (Amsterdam,  2002). 
Nimwegen,  Olaf  van,  "The  Transformation  of  Army  Organisation  in  Early-Modern  Western 

Europe,  c.  1500-1789",  in  Frank  Tallett  and  D.J.B.  Trim,  European  Warfare  7350-7750  (Cambridge, 

2010),  pp.  159-180. 
Nitiprakasika,  Gustav  Oppert  (ed.)  (1882,  reprint,  New  Delhi,  1970). 

Nogales,  Rafael  de,  Four  Years  beneath  the  Crescent,  trans,  by  Muna  Lee  (New  York,  1926). 

Noiriel,  G.,  La  tyrannie  du  national.  Le  droit  d'asile  en  Europe  7793-7993  (Paris,  1991). 

Nolan,  John  S.,  "The  Militarization  of  the  Elizabethan  State",  in  Paul  E.J.  Hammer  (ed.),  Warfare 

in  Early  Modern  Europe:  7450-7660  (Aldershot,  2007),  pp.  259-288. 
Noordziek,  J.J.F.  (ed.),  Handelingen  van  de  Staten  Generaal  gedurende  de  vergaderingen  van 

7874-heden  (The  Hague,  1889-present). 
Nordmann,  C.J.,  "L'armee  suedoise  au  XVIIe  siecle",  Revue  du  Nord,  54  (1972),  pp.  133-147. 
Nowosadtko,  Jutta,  Stehendes  Heer  im  Standestaat.  Das  Zusammenleben  von  Militar-  und 

Zivilbevblkerung  im  Furstbistum  Munster  7650-7803  (Paderborn,  2011). 

O'Hanlon,  Rosalind,  "Manliness  and  Imperial  Service  in  Mughal  North  India",  Journal  of  the 
Economic  and  Social  History  of  the  Orient,  42  (1999),  pp.  47-93. 

O'Reilly,  Ciaran  6g,  "The  Irish  Mercenary  Tradition  in  the  1600s",  in  John  France  (ed.),  Mercenar- 
ies andPaidMen:  The  Mercenary  Identity  in  theMiddleAges  (Leiden  [etc.],  2008),  pp.  383-394. 

O'Sullivan,  John,  and  Alan  M.  Meckler,  The  Draft  and  Its  Enemies:  A  Documentary  History 
(Urbana-Champaign,  IL,  1974). 

Ogiin,  Tuncay,  Kafkas  Cephesi'nin  I.  Diinya  SavasCndaki Lojistik Destegi  (Ankara,  1999). 

Okano  Masako,  "Banreki  nijunen  Neiha  heihen",  in  Ono  Yasuko  (ed.),  Minmatsu  Shinsho  no 
shakai  to  bunka  (Kyoto,  1996),  pp.  587-623. 

Okuyama  Norio,  "Kobucho  no  men  ma  no  shikyu  ni  tsuite",  Shiho,  30  (1998),  pp.  1-14. 

Okuyama  Norio,  "Mindai  no  hokuhen  ni  okeru  gunji  no  getsuryo  ni  tsuite",  in  Mindaishi  ronso 
henshtiinkai  (ed.),  Yamane  kyoju  taikyukinen  Mindaishi  ronso  (Tokyo,  1990),  pp.  149-164. 


670 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Okuyama  Norio,  "Mingun  no  kyuyo  shikyu  ni  tsuite:  Seito-Keitai  ki  o  chushin  ni  shite",  in  Wada 
Hironori  kyqju  koki  kinen  Min  Shin  jidai  no  ho  to  shakai  (Tokyo,  1993),  pp.  133-152. 

Okuyama  Norio,  "Minsho  ni  okeru  gunshi  no  kazoku  to  yukyu  ni  tsuite",  Shukan  Toyoshigaku, 
80  (1998),  pp.  60-77. 

Okuyama  Norio,  "Shotoku  Chinko  no  ran  ni  tsuite",  in  Sakuma  Shigeo  (ed.),  Chugokushi  tojishi 

ronshu:  Sakuma  Shigeo  Kyqju  taikyu  kinen  (Tokyo,  1983),  pp.  99-115. 
Oliva,  G.,  "La  coscrizione  obbligatoria  nell'Italia  unita  tra  consenso  e  rifiuto",  Movimento  operaio 

e  socialista,  1  (1986),  pp.  21-34. 
Oliva,  G.,Esercito,  paese  e  movimento  operaio.  L'antimilitarismo  dali86i  alTetagiolittiana  (Milan, 

1986). 

Olson,  James  S.,  and  Randy  Roberts,  Where  the  Domino  Fell:  America  and  Vietnam,  1945-1995, 

2nd  edn  (New  York,  1996). 
Olson,  Robert,  The  Emergence  of  Kurdish  Nationalism  and  the  Sheikh  Said  Rebellion,  7880-1925 

(Austin,  TX,  1989). 
Oman,  C,  A  History  of  the  Art  of  War  (London,  1898). 

Oppert,  Gustav,  On  the  Weapons,  Army  Organization,  and  Political  Maxims  of  the  Ancient  Hindus 
with  Special  reference  to  Gunpowder  and  Firearms  (1880,  reprint,  Ahmedabad,  1967). 

Orme,  R.,  Historical  Fragments  of  the  Mughal  Empire  (London,  1805,  reprint,  1974). 

Orr,  W.G.,  "Armed  Religious  Ascetics  in  Northern  India",  inJosJ.L.  Gommans  and  DirkH.A.  Kolff 
(eds),  Warfare  and  Weaponry  in  South  Asia:  1000-1800  (Delhi,  2001),  pp.  185-201. 

Osmanli  Ordu  Teskilati  (Ankara,  1999). 

Ozcan,  A.,  "Devsirme",  Diyanet  Vakfi  Islam  Ansiklopedisi,  vol.  IX  (Istanbul,  1994),  pp.  254-257. 
Ozdemir,  Zekeriya,  "I.  Diinya  Savasi'nda  Amele  Taburlari"  (MA  dissertation,  Gazi  Universitesi, 
1994)- 

Oztiirk,  S.,  Askeri  kassama  ait  onyedinci  asir Istanbul  tereke  defterleri  (Istanbul,  1995). 

Pagezy  de  Bourdeliac,  Louis,  De  Temploides  loisirs  du  soldatfrancais  en  temps  de paix  (Paris,  1823). 
Paiano  Marai,  "Religione  e  patria  negli  opuscoli  cattolici  per  l'esercito  italiano.  II  cristianesimo 

come  scuola  di  sacrificio  per  i  soldati  (1861-1914)"  in  Rivista  distoria  del  Cristianesimo,  2011 

(1),  pp.  7-26. 
Pakenham,  T.,  The  Boer  War  (London,  1979). 

Palmer,  J.A.B.,  "The  Origin  ofthe  Janissary",  Bulletin  of  thefohn  Rylands  library,  35, 2  (1951-1952), 
pp.  448-481. 

Palmer,  Roy  (ed.),  The  Rambling  Soldier  (Harmondsworth,  1977). 

Pamuk,  §evket,  "The  Ottoman  Economy  in  World  War  I",  in  Stephen  Broadberry  and  Mark 
Harrison  (eds),  The  Economics  of  World  War  I  (Cambridge,  2005),  pp.  112-136. 

Papoulia,  B.,  Ursprung  und  Wesen  der  Knabenlese  im  osmanischen  Reich  (Munich,  1963). 

Pargellis,  Stanley  McCrory,  "The  Four  Independent  Companies  of  New  York",  inEssays  in  Colonial 
History  Presented  to  Charles  Mclean  Andrews  by  his  Students  (orig.  edn  1933,  Freeport,  NY, 
1966),  pp.  96-123. 

Pargellis,  Stanley  McCrory,  lord loudoun  in  North  America  (orig.  edn,  1933,  reprint,  n.p.,  1968). 
Pargellis,  Stanley  McCrory  (ed.),  Military  Affairs  in  North  America,  1/48-1765:  Selected  Documents 
from  the  Cumberland  Papers  in  Windsor  Castle  (orig.  edn,  1936,  reprint,  Hamden,  CT,  1969). 
Paris,  M.,  Warrior  Nation:  Images  of  War  in  British  Popular  Culture,  1850-2000  (London,  2000). 
Parker,  Geoffrey,  The  Army  of  Flanders  and  the  Spanish  Road,  1567-1659:  The  logistics  of  Spanish 

Victory  and  Defeat  in  the  low  Countries'  Wars  (orig.  edn,  1972,  2nd  edn  Cambridge,  2004). 
Parker,  Geoffrey,  The  Dutch  Revolt  (London,  1985). 

Parker,  Geoffrey,  "Early  Modern  Europe",  inM.  Howard  etal.  (eds),  The  laws  of  War:  Constraints 
on  Warfare  in  the  Western  World  (New  Haven,  CT,  1994),  pp.  40-58. 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


671 


Parker,  Geoffrey,  The  Military  Revolution:  Military  Innovation  and  the  Rise  of  the  West,  7500-7800 
(Cambridge,  1988). 

Parker,  Geoffrey,  "Mutiny  and  Discontent  in  the  Spanish  Army  of  Flanders,  1572-1607",  Past  & 

Present,  58  (1973),  pp.  38-52- 
Parker,  Geoffrey,  The  Thirty  Years  War  (London,  1987). 

Parrott,  David,  "French  Military  Organization  in  the  1630s:  The  Failure  of  Richelieu's  Ministry", 

Seventeenth  Century  French  Studies,  9  (1987),  pp.  151-167. 
Parrott,  David,  "From  Military  Enterprise  to  Standing  Armies:  War,  State  and  Society  in  Western 

Europe,  1600-1700",  in  F.  Tallett  and  D.J.B.  Trim  (eds),  European  Warfare,  7350-7/50  (Cambridge, 

2010),  pp.  74-95- 

Parrott,  David,  Richelieu's  Army:  War,  Government  and  Society  in  France,  7624-7642  (Cambridge, 
2001). 

Parthasarati,  Prasannan,  "Was  There  Capitalism  in  Early  Modern  India?",  in  Rajat  Datta  (ed.), 
Rethinking  a  Millennium:  Perspectives  on  Indian  History  from  the  Eighth  to  the  Eighteenth 
Century,  Essays for  Harbans  Mukhia  (Delhi,  2008),  pp.  342-360. 

Pecchioli,  A.  (ed.),  le  accademie  e  le  scuole  militari  italiane  (Rome,  1990). 

Pecout,  G.,  "Les  societes  de  tir  dans  l'ltalie  unifiee  de  la  seconde  moitie  du  XIXe  siecle",  Melanges 
de  lEcolefrancaise  de  Rome.  Italie  et  Mediterranee,  102  (1990),  pp.  533-676. 

Peers,  Douglas  M.,  "The  Habitual  Nobility  of  Being':  British  Officers  and  the  Social  Construc- 
tion of  the  Bengal  Army  in  the  Early  Nineteenth  Century",  Modern  Asian  Studies,  25  (1991), 

PP-  545-569. 
Penny,  G.,  The  Traditions  of  Perth  (Perth,  1836). 

Petiteau,  Natalie,  lendemains  dEmpire:  les  soldats  de  Napoleon  dans  la  France  du  XIXe  siecle 
(Paris,  2003). 

Petrosian,  A.Y.,  Mebde-i  kanun-i yenigeri  ocagi  tarihi  (Moscow,  1988). 

Petrosian,  E.,  "The  Mabda-i  Kanuniyeniceri  ocagi  Tarihi  on  the  System  of  Devsirme",  in  G.  Kara 

(ed.),  Between  the  Danube  and  the  Caucasus  (Budapest,  1987),  pp.  217-227. 
Peyer,  Hans  Conrad,  "Die  wirtschaftliche  Bedeutung  der  fremden  Dienste  fur  die  Schweiz  vom 

15.  bis  zum  18.  Jahrhundert",  in  Hans  Conrad  Peyer,  Kbnige,  Stadt  und  Kapital  (orig.  edn, 

1978,  Zurich,  1982),  pp.  219-231. 
Phillips,  T.R.  (ed.),  Roots  of  Strategy  (London,  1943). 
Pieri,  P.,  leforze  armate  nella  eta  della  Destra  (Milan,  1962) 
Pieri,  P.,  Storia  militare  del Risorgimento: guerre  e  insurrezioni  (Turin,  1962). 
Pinch,  William  R.,  Warrior  Ascetics  and  Indian  Empires  (Cambridge,  2006). 
Pingdingjunggarfanglue  (Siku  quanshu,  Wenyuange  edn,  digital  versionZhongguo jibengujiku). 
Pingding  Hang  finchuan fanglue  (Siku  quanshu,  Wenyuange  edn,  digital  version  Zhongguo 

jibengujiku,  65). 

Pintner,  Walter  M.,  "The  Burden  of  Defense  in  Imperial  Russia,  1725-1914",  Russian  Review,  43 
(1984),  pp.  231-259. 

Pipes,  D.,  Slaves,  Soldiers  and  Islam:  The  Genesis  of  a  Military  System  (New  Haven,  CT,  1981). 
Pischedda,  P.,  Esercito  e  societa  in  Piemonte,  7848-7853  (Cuneo,  1998). 

Pittock,  Murray  G.H.,  Inventing  and  Resisting  Britain:  Cultural  Identities  in  Britain  and  Ireland, 

7685-7789  (London,  1997). 
Plank,  Geoffrey,  Rebellion  and  Savagery:  The  facobite  Rising  of  7/45  and  the  British  Empire 

(Philadelphia,  2006). 

Porch,  Douglas,  "The  French  Army  Law  of  1832",  Historical journal,  14,  4  (1971),  pp.  751-769. 
Porciani,  I.,  lafesta  della  nazione:  rappresentazione  dello  Stato  e  spazi  sociali  nell'Italia  unita 
(Bologna,  1997). 


672 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Porte,  Opinion  de  Porte  sur  le  projet  de  resolution  sur  Le  recrutement  de  I'armee  de  terre  (Paris, 

Fructidoran  VI). 
Porter,  B.D.,  War  and  the  Rise  of  the  State  (New  York,  1994). 

Posen,  B.R.,  "Nationalism,  the  Mass  Army,  and  Military  Power",  International  Security,  18  (1993), 
pp.  80-124. 

Potter,  D.,  A  History  of  France,  1460-1560  (Basingstoke,  1995). 

Potter,  D.,  Renaissance  France  at  War:  Armies,  Culture  and  Society,  c.  1480-1560  (Woodbridge, 
2008). 

Powell,  Ralph  L.,  The  Rise  of  Chinese  Military  Power  7895-7912  (Princeton,  1955). 
Prebble.John,  Mutiny:  Highland  Regiments  in  Revolt,  1743-1804  (London,  1975). 
Preston,  T.,  Patriots  in  Arms  (London,  1881). 

Price,  Richard,  An  Imperial  War  and  the  British  Working  Class:  Working- Class  Attitudes  and 
Reactions  to  the  Boer  War  i8gg-igo2  (London,  1972). 

Price,  Richard  N,  "Society,  Status  and  Jingoism:  The  Social  Roots  of  Lower  Middle  Class  Patriot- 
ism, 1870-1900",  in  G.  Crossick  (ed.),  The  lower  Middle  Class  in  Britain,  1870-1914  (New  York, 
1977).  PP-  89-112. 

Prithvirajvijayamahakavya:Aithihasik  0  KavvikParikrama,  Sanjit  Bhattacharya  (ed.)  (Calcutta, 
2003). 

Proctor,  Tammy  M.,  Civilians  in  a  World  at  War,  1914-1918  (New  York,  2010). 

Prove,  Ralf,  Militar,  Staat  und  Gesellschaft  im  19.  fahrhundert  (Munich,  2006). 

Prove,  Ralf,  Stehendes  Heer  und  stddtische  Gesellschaft  im  18.  fahrhundert.  Gbttingen  und  seine 

Militarbevblkerung  1713-1756  (Miinchen,  1995). 
Pryke,  S.,  "The  Popularity  of  Nationalism  in  the  Early  British  Boy  Scout  Movement",  Social 

History,  23,  3  (1998),  pp.  309-324. 

Qiu  Yilin,  "Mingdai  zhongqianqi  junfei  gongji  tedian  de  xingchengyu  yanbian", Jiangxi  shehui 

kexue,  6  (1994),  pp.  82-85. 
Quelch,  FL,  Social-Democracy  and  the  Armed  Nation:  Writtenfor  the  Social-Democratic  Federation 

(London,  1907). 

Quirico,  D.,  Naja.  Storia  del  servizio  di  leva  in  Italia  (Milano,  2008). 

Raa,  F.J.G.  ten,  De  uniformen  van  de  Nederlandsche  Zee-  en  landmacht  hier  te  lande  en  in  de 

kolonien,  2  vols  (Den  Haag,  1900). 
Rabie,  FL,  "The  Training  of  the  MamlukFaris",  in  V.J.  Parry  and  M.E.  Yapp  (eds),  War,  Technology 

and  Society  in  the  Middle  East  (London,  1975),  pp.  153-163. 
Raduschev,  Evgenii,  "'Peasant'  Janissaries?",  Journal  of  Social  History,  42,  2  (Winter  2008), 

pp.  447-470. 
Ram,  J.,  The  Philosophy  of  War  (London,  1878). 

Ramsay,  D.,  The  History  of  the  American  Revolution:  A  New  Edition,  vol.  I  (London,  1793). 

Rawski,  Evelyn,  The  last  Emperors:  A  Social  History  of  Qing  Imperial  Institutions  (Berkeley,  1998). 

Redlich,  Fritz,  The  German  Military  Enterpriser  and  His  WorkForce:A  Study  in  European  Economic 
and  Social  History  and  Social  History,  2  vols  (Wiesbaden,  1964). 

Repetto,  C,  Rimpatrio.  Memorie  scritte  alia  buona  nelle  ore  d'ozio  in  caserma  (Pisa,  1893). 

Revelli,  N.,  II  mondo  deivinti:  testimonianze  divita  contadina  (Turin,  2007). 

Rhodes,  G.,  Khartoum.  Khartoum  has  fallen,  and  Gordon  a  Prisoner.  In  Memento  et  Memoriam: 
The  Fall  of  Khartoum,  the  Fall  of  Gordon.  The  Soudanic  War:  strategically,  diplomatically,  re- 
ligiously, and  pacifically  considered.  Three  letters  addressed  to  the  Right  Hon.  H.C.E.  Childers, 
M.P.,  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  (Pontefract,  1885). 

Riall,  L.,  Garibaldi:  Invention  of  a  Hero  (New  Haven,  CT  [etc.],  2007). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


673 


Riall,  L.,  The  Italian  Risorgimento:  State,  Society,  and  National  Unification  (London,  1994). 
Rich,  Barnaby,  A  Short  Survey  of  Ireland  (London,  1609). 

Richards,  John  E,  "The  Economic  History  of  the  Lodi  Period:  1451-1526",  Journal oj the  Economic 

and  Social  History  of  the  Orient,  8  (1965),  pp.  47-67. 
Richards,  John  R,  The  Mughal  Empire  (1993,  reprint,  Delhi,  2002). 

Richards,  John  R,  "The  Seventeenth  Century  Crisis  in  South  Asia",  Modern  Asian  Studies,  24 
(1990),  pp.  625-638. 

Rigotti  Colin,  M.,  "Edge  d'or"  de  la  litterature  d'enfance  et  de  jeunesse  italienne.  Des  origines  au 
fascisme  (Caen,  2005). 

Ritter,  G.,  The  Sword  and  the  Scepter:  The  Problem  of  Militarism  in  Germany,  3  vols  (Coral  Gables, 
1969-1972). 

Robbins,  K.,  "Present  and  Past:  Britishlmages  of  Germany  in  the  First  Half  of  the  Twentieth  Century 

and  Their  Historical  Legacy  (Gottingen,  2000). 
Roberts,  1st  Earl  (Frederick  Roberts),  Defence  of  the  Empire.  Field-Marshall  Earl  Roberts'  Appeal 

to  the  Nation.  With  an  Introduction  by  the  EarlofMeath  (London,  1905). 
Roberts,  1st  Earl  (Frederick  Roberts),  Lord  Roberts'  Campaign  Speeches.  A  Continuation  of 'The 

Message  to  the  Nation'  (London,  1913). 
Roberts,  1st  Earl  (Frederick  Roberts),  A  Nation  in  Arms.  Speeches  on  the  Requirements  of  the  British 

Army,  delivered  by  Field-Marshall,  The  Earl  Roberts  (New  York,  1907). 
Roberts,  1st  Earl  (Frederick  Roberts),  Speeches  and  Letters  of  Field-Marshall  Earl  Roberts  on 

Imperial  Defence  (London,  1906). 
Roberts,  Michael,  The  Military  Revolution,  7560-7660  (Belfast,  1956),  reprinted  in  Michael  Roberts, 

Essays  in  Swedish  History  (Minneapolis,  1967),  pp.  195-225. 
Robertson,  J.M.,  Patriotism  and  Empire  (3rd  edn,  London,  1900). 

Robinson,  David,  Bandits,  Eunuchs,  and  the  Son  of  Heaven:  Rebellion  and  the  Economy  of  Violence 

in  Mid-Ming  China  (Honolulu,  2001). 
Robinson,  David,  "Images  of  Subject  Mongols  under  the  Ming  Dynasty",  Late  Imperial  China, 

25, 1  (2004),  pp.  59-123- 

Robinson,  David,  "The  Ming  Imperial  Family  and  the  Yuan  Legacy",  in  David  M.  Robinson  (ed.), 
Culture,  Courtiers,  and  Competition:  The  Ming  Court  (7368-7644)  (Cambridge,  MA,  2008), 
pp.  365-421. 

Robinson,  David,  "Politics,  Force,  and  Ethnicity",  Harvard Journal  of  Asiatic  Studies,  59, 1  (June 
1999).  PP-  79-123- 

Robinson,  David,  "Princely  Revolts  and  the  Ming  Polity",  paper  presented  at  the  "Ming  Provincial 

Courts"  conference,  Colgate  University,  NY,  June  2011. 
Robinson,  G.,  "Horse  Supply  and  the  Development  of  the  New  Model  Army,  1642-1646",  War  in 

History,  15  (2008),  pp.  121-140. 
Rochat,  G.,  and  G.  Massobrio,  Breve  storia  dell'esercito  italiano  dal  7867  al  1943  (Turin,  1978). 
Roegiers,  J.,  and  N.C.F.  Van  Sas,  "Revolutie  in  Noord  en  Zuid",  inJ.C.H.  Blom,  E.  Lamberts  red., 

Geschiedenis  van  de  Nedertanden  (Amsterdam,  1994),  pp.  297-310. 
Rogers,  Alan,  Empire  and  Liberty:  American  Resistance  to  British  Authority  7755-7763  (Los  Angeles, 

1974). 

Rogers,  C.J.  (ed.),  The  Military  Revolution  Debate:  Readings  on  the  Military  Trasnsformation  of 

Early  Modern  Europe  (Oxford,  1995). 
Rogg,  Matthias,  Lan dsknechte  undReisldufer.  Bildervom  Soldaten.  Ein  Stand  in  derKunstdes  76. 

Jahrhunderts  (Paderborn  [etc.],  2002). 
Rogg,  Matthias,  "Zerhauen  und  zerschnitten,  nachadelichen  Sitten:  Herkunft,  Entwicklung 

und  Funktion  soldatischer  Tracht  des  16.  Jahrhunderts  im  Spiegel  zeitgenossischer  Kunst", 


674 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


in  Bernhard  R.  Kroener  and  Ralf  Prove  (eds),  Krieg  unci  Frieden.  Militdr  und  Gesetlschaft  in 
der  Fruhen  Neuzeit  (Paderborn,  1996),  pp.  109-135. 
Romanelli,  R.,  L'ltalia  liberate  (Bologna,  1990). 

Rosen,  Stephen  Peter,  Societies  and  Military  Power:  India  and  its  Armies  (Delhi  [etc.],  1996). 
Rosenberg,  Rainer  von,  Soldatenwerbung  und  militarisches  Durchzugsrecht  im  Zeitalter  des 

Absolutismus  (Frankfurt  am  Main,  1973). 
Rosener,  W.  (ed.),  Staat  und  Krieg.  Vom  Mittelalter  bis  zur  Moderne  (Gottingen,  2000). 
Ross,  C,  Representative  Government  and  War  (London,  1903). 
Rossabi,  Morris,  The  Jurchens  in  the  Yuan  and  Ming  (Ithaca,  NY,  1982). 

Rosselli,  N.,  Mazzini  e  Bakunin.  Dodici  anni  di  movimento  operaio  in  Italia  (1860-7872)  (Turin,  1982). 
Rostker,  Bernard,  /  Want  You!  The  Evolution  of  the  All-Volunteer  Force  (Santa  Monica,  CA,  2006). 
Rothenberg,  Gunther  E.,  The  Military  Border  in  Croatia  7/40-1887  (Chicago,  IL,  1966). 
Rousseau,  Frederic,  Service  militaire  auXIXe  siecle:  de  la  resistance  a  I'obeissance.  Un  siecle 

d'apprentissage  de  la  patrie  dans  le  departement  de  I'Herault  (Montpellier,  1998). 
Rovinello,  Marco,  '"Giuro  di  essere  fedele  al  Re  ed  a'  suoi  reali  successori'.  Disciplina  militare, 

civilizzazione  e  nazionalizzazione  nell'Italia  liberale",  Storica,  49  (2011),  pp.  95-140. 
Rovinello,  Marco,  "Tra  Marte  ed  Atena.  La  giustizia  militare  italiana  in  tempo  di  pace  attraverso 

le  carte  dei  tribunali  territoriali  (1861-1914)",  Ricerche  di  storiapolitica,  3  (2011),  pp.  325-348. 
Rowlands,  G.,  The  Dynastic  State  and  the  Army  under  louis  XIV:  Royal  Service  and  Private  Interest, 

1661-1701  (Cambridge,  2002). 
Rowlands,  G.,  "Louis  XIV,  Aristocratic  Power  and  the  Elite  Units  of  the  French  Army",  French 

History,  13  (1999),  pp.  303-331- 
Roy,  Kaushik,  Brown  Warriors  of  the  Raj:  Recruitment  and  the  Mechanics  of  Command  in  the 

Sepoy  Army  i8sg-igi3  (Delhi,  2009). 
Roy,  Nirodbhusan,  Niamatullah's  History  of the  Afghans  (n.d.,  reprint,  Lahore,  2002). 
Royen,  Paul  van,  Jaap  Bruijn  and  Jan  Lucassen,  (eds),  Those  Emblems  of  Hell?  European  Sailors 

and  the  Maritime  labour  Marketisjo-i8jo  (St  John's,  1997). 
Roynette,  Odile,  'Bans  pour  le  Service":  I'experience  de  la  caserne  en  France  a  lafin  duXIXe  siecle 

(Paris,  2000). 

Rudolph,  Lloyd  I.  (ed.),  The  Idea  ofRajasthan,  Explorations  in  Regional  Identity ,  vol.  II,  Institutions 

(Delhi,  1994),  pp.  192-216. 
Riiger,  J.,  "Nation,  Empire,  and  Navy:  Identity  Politics  in  the  United  Kingdom  1887-1914",  Past  & 

Present  185  (2004),  pp.  159-188. 
Rule,  John,  The  labouring  Classes  in  Early  Industrial  England,  1750-1850  (London,  1986). 
Rule,  John,  The  Vital  Century:  England's  Developing  Economy,  1714-1815  (London,  1992). 

Sabron,  F.H.A.,  Geschiedenis  van  het  i24ste  Regiment Infanterie  van  linie  onder Keizer Napoleon 
/(Breda,  1910). 

Sabron,  F.H.A.,  Geschiedenis  van  het  33ste  Regiment  lichte  Infanterie  (Het  Oud-Hollandse  sde 

Regiment fagers)  onder  Keizer  Napoleon  I  (Breda,  1910). 
Sacchi,  V.,  Prima  libra  di  lettura  ad  uso  del  soldato  (Turin,  1878). 
Saeed,  Mian  Muhammad,  The  Sharqi  Sultanate  ofjaunpur  (Karachi,  1972). 
Saeki  Tomi,  "Min  Shin  jidai  no  minso  ni  tsuite",  Toyoshi  kenkyu,  15,  4  (1957),  pp.  33-64. 
Sahillioglu,  FL,  "Osmanh  Imparatorlugunda  Sivis  Y1I1  Burhanlan",  IUIFM,  27,  1-2  (1967-1968), 

pp.  75-111. 

Said,  Edward,  Orientalism  (New  York,  1978). 

Salinger,  Sharon  V.,  "To  Serve  Well  and  Faithfully":  labor  and  Indentured  Servants  in  Pennsylvania, 
1682-1800  (Cambridge,  1987). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


675 


Sanborn,  Joshua  A.  Drafting  the  Russian  Nation:  Military  Conscription,  Total  War,  and  Mass 

Politics,  7905-1925  (De  Kalb,  IL,  2003). 
Sarkar,  Jadunath,  Fall  of  the  Mughal  Empire,  vol.  II,  1754-71  (1934,  reprint,  Delhi,  1991). 
Sarkar,  Jadunath,  Nadir  Shah  in  India  (1925,  reprint,  Calcutta,  1973). 
Sarkar,  Jadunath,  A  Short  History  of Aurangzib:  1618-1707  (1930,  reprint,  New  Delhi,  1979). 
Sarkar,  Jagadish  Narayan,  TheLifeofMirfumla:  The  General  of  Aurangzeb  (Delhi,  1979). 
Sas,  N.C.F.  van,  Onze  natuurlijkste  bondgenoot.  Nederland,  Engeland  en  Europa,  1813-1831  (Gro- 

ningen,  1985). 

Saunders,  C,  and  I.R.  Smith,  "Southern  Africa,  1795-1914",  in  The  Oxford  History  of  the  British 
Empire,  vol.  Ill,  The  Nineteenth  Century ,  A.  Porter  and  A.  Low(eds)  (Oxford,  1999),  pp.  597-623. 

Savory,  Reginald,  His  Britannic  Majesty's  Army  in  Germany  during  the  Seven  Years  War  (Oxford, 
1966). 

Scahill,  Jeremy,  Blackwater:  The  Rise  of  the  World's  Most  Powerful  Mercenary  Army  (New  York, 
2008). 

Scarpellini,  E.,  LTtalia  del  consumi.  Dalla  Belle  Epoque  al  nuovo  millennio  (Rome  [etc.],  2008). 
Scates,  Bruce,  "The  Price  of  War:  Labour  Historians  Confront  Military  History",  Labour  History, 

84  (2003),  pp.  133-143- 
Schama,  S.,  Patriots  and  Liberators:  Revolution  in  the  Netherlands  (New  York,  1977). 
Schaufelberger,  Walter,  Der  alte  Schweizer  undsein  Krieg  (Zurich,  1952). 

Schaufelberger,  Walter,  "Von  der  Kriegsgeschichte  zur  Militargeschichte",  Schweizerische 

Zeitschriftfur  Geschichte,  41  (1991),  pp.  413-451. 
Schehl,  Karl,  Mit  der  grojien  Armee  1812  von  Krefeld  nach  Moskau  (Diisseldorf  1912). 
Schennach,  Martin  Paul,  Ritter,  Landsknecht,  Aufgebot.  Quellen  zum  Tiroler Kriegswesen  14--17. 

fahrhundert  (Innsbruck,  2004). 
Schlieffen,  Graf  A.  von,  UberdieMillionenheere  (1911),  in  Cannae.  Mit  einerAuswahlvonAufsdtzen 

undReden  des  Feldmarschalls,  H.  Freiherr  von  Freytag-Loringhoven  (ed.)  (Berlin,  1925). 
Schmoller,  Gustav  von,  Umrisse  und  Untersuchungen  zur  Verfassungs-,  Verwaltungs-  und 

Wirtschaftsgeschichte  besonders  des  Preujiischen  Staates  im  17.  und  18.  fahrhundert  (Leipzig, 

1898,  reprint,  Hildesheim  [etc.],  1974). 
Schnapper,  Bernard,  Le  remplacementmilitaire  en  France:  Quelques  aspects  politiques,  econom- 

iques  et  sociaux  du  recrutement  auXIXe  siecle  (Paris,  1968). 
Schnitter,  Helmut,  Volk  und Landesdefension  (Berlin,  1977). 

Schoenmaker,  B.,  Burgerzin  en  soldatengeest:  de  relatie  tussen  volk,  leger  en  vloot  1832-1^14 
(Amsterdam,  2009). 

Schultz,  Ronald,  Republic  of  Labor:  Philadelphia's  Artisans  and  the  Politics  of  Class,  1720-1830 
(New  York,  1993). 

Schulz,  W.  von,  Die  preujiischen  Werbungen  unter  Friedrich  Wilhelml.  und  Friedrich  dem  Grojien 
bis  zumBeginn  des Tjahrigen Krieges  mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung Mecklenburg-Schwerins 
(Schwerin,  1887). 

Schulze,  Winfried,  "Die  deutschen  Landesdefensionen  im  16.  und  17.  Jahrhundert",  injohannes 
Kunisch  (ed.),  Staatsverjassung  und  Heeresverjassung  in  der  europaischen  Geschichte  der 
fruhen  Neuzeit  (Berlin,  1986),  pp.  129-149. 

Schiissler,  Walter,  "Das  Werbewesen  in  der  Reichsstadt  Heilbronn,  vornehmlich  im  18.  Jahrhun- 
dert" (Ph.D.  dissertation,  University  of  Tubingen,  1951). 

Schwark,  Thomas,  Liibecks  Stadtmilitdr  im  17.  und  18.  Jahrhundert  (Liibeck,  1990). 

Schwartz,  Franz,  Organisation  und  Verpflegung  derpreussischen  Lanmilizen  im  Siebenjahrigen 
Krieg  (Leipzig,  1898). 

Schwoerer,  Lois  G.,No  Standing  Armies:  The  Antiarmy  Ideology  in  Seventeenth-Century  England 
(Baltimore,  1974). 


676 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Scott,  H.,  "The  Fiscal-Military  State  and  International  Rivalry  during  the  Long  Eighteenth 
Century",  in  C.  Storrs  (ed.),  The  Fiscal-Military  State  in  Eighteenth-Century  Europe  (Farnham, 
2009),  pp.  25-53. 

Searle,  G.E.,  The  Quest  for  National  Efficiency:  A  Study  in  British  Politics  and  British  Political 

Thought,  7899-7914  (Oxford,  1971). 
Segal,  David  R.,  Recruiting  for  Uncle  Sam:  Citizenship  and  Military  Manpower  Policy  (Lawrence, 

KS,  1989). 

Selesky,  Harold  E.,  War  and  Society  in  Colonial  Connecticut  (New  Haven,  CT,  1990). 

Sencer,  Kusc^ubasi  Es ref,  Turkish  Battle  atKhaybar,  trans,  by  Philip  H.  Stoddard  (Istanbul,  1997). 

Serman,  William,  Les  Officiersfrancais  dans  la  nation,  7848-7974  (Paris,  1982). 

Seton-Watson,  C,  Italy  from  Liberalism  to  Fascism,  7870-7925  (London,  1967). 

Seume,  Johann  Gottfried,  MeinLeben,  in  Seume,  Prosaschriften,  ed.  by  Werner  Kraft  (Koln,  1962). 

Seyfi,  Salime  Servet,  "Oglumu  Hududa  Gonderdikten  Sonra",  Yeni Mecmua  (Canakkate  Niisha-i 

Fevkaladesi)  (Special  Issue,  March  1915),  pp.  103-104. 
The  Shah  fahan  Nama  of Inay  at  Khan,  An  Abridged  History  of  the  Mughal  Emperor  Shah  fahan, 

compiled  by  his  RoyalLibrarian,  ed.  and  completed  by  WE.  Begley  and  Z.A.  Desai  (Delhi,  1990). 
Sharma,  Ravindra  Kumar,  "The  Military  System  of  the  Mewar  (Udaipur)  State  (Ca.  800  to  1947 

AD)",  Central  Asiatic  Journal,  30  (1986),  pp.  116-140. 
Shaw,  Stanford  J.,  The  Ottoman  Empire  in  World  War  I,  vol.  I,  Prelude  to  War  (Ankara,  2006). 
Shcherbinin,  P.P.,  Voennyifactor  v  povsednevnoi  zhizni  russkoi  zhenshchiny  v XVIH-nachale  XX 

v.  (Tambov,  2004). 

Sheikh,  Samira,  Forging  a  Region:  Sultans,  Traders,  and  Pilgrims  in  Gujarat,  7200-7500  (New 
Delhi,  2010). 

Shenjian,  "Xinhai  geming  qianxi  woguo  zhi  lujun  ji  qi  junfei",  Wenzhai,  2  (1937),  pp.  139-140. 
Shepherd,  John  Robert,  Statecraft  and  Political  Economy  on  the  Taiwan  Frontier,  7600-7800 
(Stanford,  1993). 

Shi  Wanshou,  "Lun  Ming  Zheng  de  bingyuan",  Dalu  zazhi,  41,  6  (1970),  pp.  188-197. 

Shigeki,  Iwai,  "China's  Frontier  Society  in  the  Sixteenth  and  Seventeenth  Centuries",  Acta 

Asiatica,  88  (2005),  pp.  1-20. 
Shin,  Leo,  The  Making  of  the  Chinese  State:  Ethnicity  and  Expansion  on  the  Ming  Borderlands 

(Cambridge,  2006). 
Shuckburgh  Risley,  J.,  The  Law  of  War  (London,  1897). 
Shyam,  Radhey,  Life  and  Times  of  Malik  Ambar  (Delhi,  1968). 

Sicken,  Bernhard,  "Die  oranische  Heeresreform",  in  Horst  Lademacher  (ed.),  Onder  den  Oranje 
Boom.  Niederlandische  Kunst  undKultur  im  77.  und  78.Jahrhundert  an  deutschen  Fiirstenhofen 
(Munchen,  1999),  pp.  103-116, 435"438- 

Sicken,  Bernhard,  "Die  preuKische  Werbung  in  Franken",  in  Heinz  Duchhardt  (ed.),  Friedrich 
der  Grofie,  Franken  und  das  Reich  (Koln  [etc.],  1986),  pp.  121-156. 

Sickesz,  C.J.,  Schutterijen  in  Nedertand  (Utrecht,  1864). 

Sikora,  Michael,  Disziplin  und  Desertion.  Strukturprobleme  militarischer  Organisation  im  78. 

Jahrhundert  (Berlin,  1996). 
Sikora,  Michael,  "Die  Mechanisierung  des  Kriegers",  in  Rebekka  von  Mallinckrodt  (ed.),  Bewegtes 

Leben.  Korpertechniken  in  der  Fruhen  Neuzeit  (Wolfenbiittel,  2008),  pp.  143-166,  319-327. 
Sikora,  Michael,  "Militarisierung  und  Zivilisierung.  Die  preuKischen  Heeresreformen  und  ihre 

Ambivalenzen,  in  Peter  Baumgart  etal.  (eds),  Die  preufiische  Armee.  Zwischen  Ancien  Regime 

und Reichsgrimdung  (Paderborn  [etc.],  2008),  pp.  164-195. 
Sikora,  Michael,  "Soldner:  historische  Annaherung  an  einen  Kriegertypus",  Geschichte  und 

Gesellschaft,  29  (2003),  pp.  210-238. 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


677 


STmsek,  Veysel,  "Ottoman  Military  Recruitment  and  the  Recruit,  1826-1853"  (MA  dissertation, 

Bilkent  University,  2005). 
Singer,  P.W.,  Corporate  Warriors:  The  Rise  of  the  Privatized  Military  Industry  (2003,  2nd  revised 

edn,  New  York,  2008). 
Singh,  Madan  Paul,  Indian  Army  under  the  East  India  Company  (New  Delhi,  1976). 
Singha,  Radhika,  "Finding  Labor  from  India  for  the  War  in  Iraq:  The  Jail  Porter  and  Labor  Corps, 

1916-1920",  Comparative  Studies  in  Society  and  History,  49,  2  (April  2007),  pp.  412-445. 
Skelley,  A.R.,  The  Victorian  Army  at  Home:  The  Recruitment  and  Terms  and  Conditions  of  the 

British  Regular,  i8sg-i8gg  (London,  1977). 
Smets,  Josef,  "Von  der  'Dorfidylle'  zur  preuKischen  Nation.  Sozialdisziplinierung  der  links- 

rheinischen  Bevolkerung  durch  die  Franzosen  am  Beispiel  der  allgemeinen  Wehrpflicht 

(1802-1814)",  Historische  Zeitschrift,  262  (1996),  pp.  697-738. 
Smiley,  Will,  "The  Rules  of  War  on  the  Ottoman  Frontiers:  An  Overview  of  Military  Captivity, 

1699-1829",  in  Plamen  Mitev,  Ivan  Parvev,  Maria  Baramova,  and  Vania  Racheva  (eds),  Empires 

and  Peninsulas:  Southeastern  Europe  between  Karlowitz  and  the  Peace  of Adrianople,  7699-7S29 

(Berlin,  2010),  pp.  63-84. 
Smith,  Vincent  A.,  Akbar:  The  Great  Mogul,  1542-1605  (n.d.,  reprint,  Delhi,  1962). 
Smout,  T.C.,  A  History  of  the  Scottish  People  7560-1830  (London,  1969). 

Smyth,  Jim,  The  Men  of  No  Property:  Irish  Radicals  and  Popular  Politics  in  the  late  Eighteenth 

Century  (London,  1992). 
Snapper,  F,  "Het  negentiende  eeuwse  Nederlandse  leger:  een  school  der  natie?",  Mededelingen 

van  de  Sectie  Militaire  Geschiedenis landmachtstaf  7  (1984),  pp.  37-56. 
So  In-bom,  "Eijo  to  eijogun  -  gunshi  no  senju  hoho  o  chushin  ni",  Mindaishi  kenkyu,  27  (1999), 

PP-  5-29- 

Soboul,  Albert,  la  Revolution francaise  (Paris,  1982). 

Soboul,  Albert,  les  sans-culottes  parisiens  en  Van  II:  Mouvement  populaire  et  gouvernement 

revolutionnaire,  2  juin  rygs-g  thermidor  an  II  (Paris,  1958). 
Sondhaus,  L.,  In  the  Service  of  the  Emperor:  Italians  in  the  Austrian  Armed  Forces,  7S74-797S 

(Boulder,  1990). 

Sormani,  G.,  Mortalita  dell'esercito  italiano:  studi  di  statistica  sanitaria  e  di  geografia  medica 

presentati  alia  giunta  centrale  di  statistica  (Rome,  1877). 
Sotiriou,  Dido,  Farewell  to  Anatolia,  trans,  by  Fred  A.  Reed  (Athens,  1991). 
Spandouyn  Cantacasin,  Th.,  Petit  traicte  de  I'origine  des  Turcqz,  Ch.  Scheffer  (ed.)  (Paris,  1896). 
Spataris,  Haris,  "Biz  Istanbullular  Boyleyiz":  Fener'den  Amlar,  7906-1922,  trans,  by  Iro  Kaplangi 

(Istanbul,  2004). 

Spender,  A.J.,  The  life  of  Sir  Henry  Campbell  Bannerman,  2  vols  (London,  1923). 
Spiers,  E.M.,  The  Army  and  Society  (London,  1980). 

Spivak,  Gayatri,  "Can  the  Subaltern  Speak?",  in  Cary  Nelson  and  Lawrence  Grossberg  (eds), 

Marxism  and  the  Interpretations  of  Culture  (London  and  New  York,  1988),  pp.271-313. 
Statistics  of  the  Military  Effort  of  the  British  Empire  during  the  Great  War  (7914-7920)  (London,  1922). 
Staudinger,  Karl,  Geschichte  des  kurbayerischen  Heeres  unter  Kurfiirst  Karl  Albrecht  -  Kaiser 

Karl  VII.  -  und  Kurfiirst  Max  III.  foseph  7726-7777,  2  vols  (Geschichte  des  Bayerischen  Heeres, 

III)  (Miinchen,  1908/1909). 
Staudinger,  Karl,  Geschichte  des  kurbayerischen  Heeres  unter  Kurfiirst  Max  II.  Emanueh68o-ijos, 

2  vols  (Geschichte  des  Bayerischen  Heeres,  II)  (Miinchen,  1904/1905). 
Steinsieck,  A.,  "Ein  imperialistischer  Medienkrieg.  Kriegsberichterstatter  im  Siidafrikanischen 

Krieg  (1889-1902)",  in  U.  Daniel  (ed.),  Augenzeugen.  Kriegsberichterstattung  vom  78.  bis  zum 

27.  fahrhundert  (Gottingen,  2006),  pp.  87-112. 


678 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Steppler,  Glenn  A.,  "The  Common  Soldier  in  the  Reign  of  George  III,  1760-1793"  (D.Phil,  disserta- 
tion, University  of  Oxford,  1984). 
Stevens,  Carol  B.,  Russia's  Wars  of  Emergence  7460-7/30  (London,  2007). 

Stevens,  Carol  B.,  Soldiers  on  the  Steppes:  Army  Reform  and  Social  Change  in  Early  Modern  Russia 
(Dekalb,  IL,  1995). 

Steward,  Richard  W.  (general  ed.),  American  Military  History:  The  United  States  Army  in  a  Global 

Era,  7977-2003  (Washington,  DC,  2005). 
Stiehm,  Judith  Hicks,  Arms  and  the  Enlisted  Woman  (Philadelphia,  1989). 
Stoddard,  Philip  H.,  "The  Ottoman  Government  and  the  Arabs,  1911  to  1918:  A  Preliminary  Study 

of  the  Teskilat-i  Mahsusa"  (Ph.D.  dissertation,  Princeton  University,  1963). 
Stollberg-Rilinger,  Barbara,  Der  Staat  als  Maschine.  Zur  politischen  Metaphorik  des  absoluten 

Furstenstaats  (Berlin,  1986). 
Storrs,  Christopher  (ed.),  The  Fiscal-Military  State  inEighteenth  Century  Europe  (Farnham,  2009). 
Storrs,  Christopher,  War,  Diplomacy  and  the  Rise  of  Savoy,  7690-7720  (Cambridge,  1999). 
Storrs,  Christopher,  and  H.M.  Scott,  "The  Military  Revolution  and  the  European  Nobility,  c. 

1600-1800",  in  Jeremy  Black  (ed.),  Warfare  in  Europe:  7650-7792  (Aldershot,  2005),  pp.  3-43. 
Strachan,  Hew,  The  First  World  War  (London,  2006). 

Strachan,  Hew,  History  of  the  Cambridge  University  Officers  Training  Corps  (Tunbridge  Wells, 
1976). 

Strachan,  Hew,  "Militar,  Empire  und  Civil  Society:  GroKbritannien  im  19.  Jahrhundert",  in  Ute 
Frevert  (ed.),  Militar  und  Gesellschaft  im  79.  und20.fahrhundert  (Stuttgart,  1997),  pp.  78-93. 

Stradling,  R.A.,  Europe  and  the  Decline  of  Spain:  A  Study  of  the  Spanish  System  (London,  1981). 

Stradling,  R.A.,  The  Spanish  Monarchy  and  Irish  Mercenaries:  The  Wild  Geese  in  Spain  7678-68 
(Blackrock,  1994). 

Stremmelaar,  Annemarike,  "Justice  and  Revenge  in  the  Ottoman  Rebellion  of  1703"  (Ph.D. 

dissertation,  University  of  Leiden,  2007). 
Streusand,  Douglas  E.,  The  Formation  of  the  Mughal  Empire  (Delhi,  1989). 
Strieter,  T.W,  "An  Army  in  Evolution:  French  Officers  Commissioned  from  the  Ranks,  1848-1895", 

Military  Affairs,  42  (1978),  pp.  177-181. 
Struve,  Lynn,  "The  Southern  Ming,  1644-1662",  in  The  Cambridge  History  of  China,  vol.  VII, 

Frederick  W.  Mote  and  Denis  Twitchett  (eds),  The  Ming  Dynasty,  7368-7644,  Part  1  (Cambridge, 

1988),  pp.  641-725. 

Sunar,  Mehmet  Mert,  "Ocak-i  Amire'den  Ocak-i  Mulga'ya  Dogru:  Nizam-i  Cedid  Reformlari 
Kar^isinda  Yeniceriler",  in  Seyfi  Kenan  (ed.),  Nizam-i  Kadim'den  Nizam-i  Cedid'e  III.  Selim 
veDonemi  (Istanbul,  2010),  pp.  497-527. 

Surridge,  K.T.,  Managing  the  South  African  War,  7899-7902:  Politicians  v.  Generals  (Rochester,  1999). 

Suter,  H.,  Inner-Schweizerisches  Militdrunternehmertum  im  78.  fahrhundert  (Zurich,  1971). 

Suzuki  Tadashi,  "Mindai  katei  ko",  Shikan,  37  (1952),  pp.  23-40. 

Suzuki  Tadashi,  "Mingdai  kahei  ko",  Shikan,  22-23  (i94<>)>  pp.  1-26. 

Swope,  Kenneth,  "All  Men  Are  Not  Brothers:  Ethnic  Identity  and  Dynasty  Loyalty  in  the  Ningxia 

Mutiny  of  1592",  late  Imperial  China,  24, 1  (2003),  pp.  79-129. 
Swope,  Kenneth,  A  Dragon's  Head  and  A  Serpent's  Tail:  Ming  China  and  The  First  Great  East  Asian 

War,  7592-7598  (Norman,  OK,  2009). 
Swope,  Kenneth,  "A  Few  Good  Men:  The  Li  Family  and  China's  Northern  Frontier  in  the  Late 

Ming",  Ming  Studies,  34  (2005),  pp.  34-81. 
Szabo,  Franz  A.,  Kaunitz  and  Enlightened  Absolutism  7753-7780  (Cambridge,  1987). 
Szonyi,  Michael,  Practicing  Kinship:  lineage  and  Descent  in  late  Imperial  China  (Stanford,  CA, 

2002). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


679 


Tallett,  Frank,  "Soldats  et  actes  de  violence  a  l'encontre  des  civils  dans  les  lies  britanniques 
au  dix-septieme  siecle",  in  F.  Cochet  (ed.),  Les  violences  de  guerre  a  Tegard  des  civUs  (Metz, 
2005),  pp.  23-54. 

Tallett,  Frank,  War  and  Society  in  Early-Modern  Europe  (London,  1992). 

Tallett,  Frank,  and  D.J.B.  Trim,  "Then  Was  Then  and  Now  is  Now'",  in  Frank  Tallett  and  D.J.B. 

Trim  (eds),  European  Warfare,  1350-7750  (Cambridge,  2010),  pp.  1-26. 
Tayler,  A.,  and  H.  Tayler,  The  House  of  Forbes  (Aberdeen,  1937). 

Taylor,  Peter  K.,  "Disagreement  over  the  Hessian  Military  State  of  the  Eighteenth  Century", 

Central  European  History,  28  (1995),  pp.  429-433. 
Taylor,  Peter  K.,  Indentured  to  Liberty.  Peasant  Life  and  the  Hessian  Military  State  1688-1815 

(Ithaca,  NY,  1994). 

Taylor,  Romeyn,  "Yuan  Origins  of  the  Wei-so  System",  in  Charles  Hucker  (ed.),  Chinese  Govern- 
ment in  Ming  Times:  Seven  Studies  (New  York,  1969),  pp.  23-40. 

The  Tezkereh  al  Vakiat  or  Private  Memoirs  of  the  Moghul  Emperor  Humayun  written  in  Persian 
Language  by  fouher,  a  confidential  domestic  of  his  Majesty,  Major  Charles  Stewart  (ed.) 
(London,  1832). 

Theobald,  Ulrich,  "The  Second Jinchuan  Campaign  (1771  - 1776):  Economic,  Social  and  Political 
Aspects  of  an  Important  Qing  Period  Border  War"  (Ph.D.  dissertation,  Eberhard  Karls  Univer- 
sitat  Tubingen  2010),  http://tobias-lib.uni-tuebingen.de/volltexte/2011/5395/pdf/Theobald.pfd 

Thompson,  A.M.,  Towards  Conscription,  jubilee  Patriotism:  Its  Meaning,  Cause,  and  Effects 
(London,  1898). 

Thompson,  E.P,  The  Making  of  the  English  Working  Class  (New  York,  1964). 
Thompson,  I.A.A.,  War  and  Government  in  Habsburg  Spain,  1560-1620  (London,  1976). 
Thomson,  J.E.,  Mercenaries,  Pirates  and  Sovereigns:  State-Building  and  Extraterritorial  Violence 

in  Early  Modern  Europe  (Princeton,  1994). 
Thorner,  Daniel  etal.  (eds),  A.V.  C  hay anov  on  the  Theory  of Peasant  Economy  (Homewood,  1966). 
Thursfield,  J.R.,  "Captain  Mahan's  Writings",  The  Times,  1  April  1893,  reprinted  in  G.S.  Clarke 

andJ.R.  Thursfield,  The  Navy  and  the  Nation  or  Naval  Warfare  and  Imperial  Defence  (London, 

1897),  pp.  188-198. 

Thursfield,  J.R.,  "Thejeune  Ecole  Francaise",  Naval  Annual  (1894),  reprinted  in  G.S.  Clarke  and 
J.R.  Thursfield,  The  Navy  and  the  Nation  or  Naval  Warfare  and  Imperial  Defence  (London, 
1897).  PP- 199-214- 

Tilly,  Charles,  Coercion,  Capital  and  European  States  AD  ggo-iggo  (Cambridge,  MA,  1990). 
Tilly,  Charles,  The  Contentious  French  (Cambridge,  MA,  1986). 

Tilly,  Charles  (ed.),  The  Formation  of  National  States  in  Western  Europe  (Princeton,  1975). 
Tilly,  Charles,  "Reflections  on  the  History  of  European  State-Making",  in  Charles  Tilly  (ed.),  The 

Formation  of  National  States  in  Western  Europe  (Princeton,  1975),  pp.  3-83. 
Tilly,  Charles,  Social  Movements  1/68-2004  (Boulder,  CO,  2004). 

Tilly,  Charles,  "States  and  Nationalism  in  Europe  1492-1992",  inJ.L.  Comaroff  and  PC.  Stern  (eds), 
Perspectives  on  Nationalism  and  War  (Amsterdam,  1995),  pp.  187-204. 

Tilly,  Charles,  "War  Making  and  State  Making  as  Organized  Crime",  in  Peter  Evans,  Dietrich  Rii- 
schemeyer,  and  Theda  Skocpol  (eds),  Bringing  the  State Backin  (Cambridge,  1985),  pp.  169-187. 

Tilly,  Chris  and  Tilly,  Charles,  Work  under  Capitalism  (Boulder,  CO,  1998). 

Titus,  James,  The  Old  Dominion  at  War:  Society,  Politics,  and  Warfare  in  Late  Colonial  Virginia 
(Columbia,  SC,  1991). 

Tlusty,  B.  Ann,  The  Martial  Ethic  in  Early  Modern  Germany:  Civic  Duty  and  the  Right  of  Arms 
(Basingstoke,  2011). 


680 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Toledano,  Ehud,  "The  Emergence  of  Ottoman-Local  Elites  (1700-1800):  A  Framework  for  Re- 
search", in  I.  Pappe  and  M.  Ma'oz  (eds),  Middle  East  Politics  and  Ideas:  A  History  from  Within 
(London,  1997),  pp.  145-162. 

Toprak,  Zafer,  Ittihad- Terakkive  Cihan  Harbi:  Savas  Ekonomisive  Turkiye'de  Devletcilik,  ror^-rorS 
(Istanbul,  2003). 

Toprak,  Zafer,  Turkiye'de  Milli  Iktisat,  rgo8-rgr8  (Ankara,  1982). 

Torre,  E,  Delia  leva  suigiovani  nati  nell'anno  ...  (Florence  -  Turin,  1864-1870). 

Torre,  F,  Delia  leva  sui  giovani  nati  nell'anno  7843  e  delle  vicende  dell'esercito  dal  7  ottobre  7863 
al  30  settembre  7864:  relazione  del  maggior  generate  Federico  Torre  al  signor  ministro  della 
guerra  (Turin,  1865). 

Torre,  F.,  Della  leva  suigiovani  nati  nell'anno  7845  e  delle  vicende  dell'esercito  dal  7  ottobre  7865 

al  30  settembre  7866:  relazione  del  maggior  generale  Federico  Torre  al  signor  ministro  della 

guerra  (Florence,  1867). 
Torre,  F,  Della  leva  sui  giovani  nati  nell'anno  7845  e  delle  vicende  dell'esercito  dal  7  ottobre  7870 

at  30  settembre  78/7:  relazione  del  maggior  generale  Federico  Torre  al  signor  ministro  delta 

guerra  (Rome  [etc.],  1872). 
Torre,  F,  Delia  leva  suigiovani  nati  nell'anno  7847  e  delle  vicende  dell'esercito  dal  7  ottobre  7868 

al  30  settembre  7869:  relazione  del  maggior  generale  Federico  Torre  al  signor  ministro  della 

guerra  (Florence,  1870). 

Torre,  F,  Relazione  sulle  leve  eseguite  in  Italia  dalle  annessioni  delle  varie  province  al30  settembre 

7863  (Turin,  1864). 
Tracy,  J.D.,  Emperor  Charles  V,  Impresario  of  War  (Cambridge,  2002). 

Trim,  D.J.B.  (ed.),  The  Chivalric  Ethos  and  the  Development  of  Military  Professionalism  (Leiden, 
2003). 

Trim,  D.J.B.,  "Fighting  'Jacob's  Wars':  The  Employment  of  English  and  Welsh  Mercenaries  in  the 
European  Wars  of  Religion"  (Ph.D.,  King's  College,  London,  2002). 

Trivedi,  K.K.,  "The  Share  of  the  Mansabdars  in  State  Revenue  Resources:  A  Study  of  the  Mainte- 
nance of  Animals",  Indian  Economic  and  Social  History  Review,  24  (1987),  pp.  411-422. 

Trivedi,  Madhu,  "Images  of  Women  from  the  Fourteenth  to  the  Sixteenth  Century:  A  Study  of 
Sufi  Premkahaniyas",  in  Rajat  Datta  (ed.),  Rethinking  a  Millennium:  Perspectives  on  Indian 
History  from  the  Eighth  to  the  Eighteenth  Century,  Essays  for  Harbans  Mukhia  (Delhi,  2008), 
pp.  198-221. 

Trochu,  Louis-Jules,  I'armee frangaise  en  7867  (Paris,  1867). 

Turan,  S.,  Sehzdde BayezidVak'asi  (Ankara,  1961). 

Turk  SilahU  Kuvvetleri  Tarihi,  vol.  Ill,  part  6  (790S-7Q20)  (Ankara,  1971). 

Turk  Silahli  Kuvvetleri  Tarihi,  vol.  X,  Osmanli  Devri,  Birinci  Diinya  Harbi,  Idari  Faaliyetler  ve 

lojistik  (Ankara,  1985). 
The  Turkish  letters  of  Ogier  Ghiselin  de  Busbeq,  trans,  by  E.  S.  Forster  (Oxford,  1927). 
Turner,  Sir  James,  Memoirs  of  His  Own  life  and  Times,  7632-76/0  (Edinburgh,  1829). 

Uitterhoeve,  W,  Cornells  Kraijenhoff  7758-7840.  Een  loopbaan  ondervijfregeervormen  (Nijmegen, 
2009). 

Underwood,  W.C.,  A  Plea  for  National  Military  Training  in  Britain  (2nd  edn,  London,  1907). 
Upton,  A.  F,  Charles  XI  and  Swedish  Absolutism  (Cambridge,  1998). 

Uyar,  Mesut,  and  Edward  J.  Erickson,  A  Military  History  of  the  Ottomans:  From  Osman  toAtatiirk 
(Santa  Barbara,  2009). 

Uzuncarsili,  I.H.,  Osmanh  devleti  teskilat7ndan  kapu  kulu  ocaklar7,  2  vols  (Ankara,  1943-1944). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


681 


Vallee,  Gustave,  La  conscription  dans  le  department  de  la  Charente  (7798-7807)  (Paris,  1936). 
Vatin,  Nicholas,  and  Gilles  Veinstein,  "Paroles  d'oglan,  jeunes  esclaves  de  la  Porte  (XVIe-XVIIe 

siecles);  Melanges  Pierre  Chuvin  (forthcoming). 
Vatin,  Nicholas,  and  Gilles  Veinstein,  Le  serail  ebranle:  essaisur  les  marts  et  depositions  des  sultans 

ottomans,  XlVe-XIXe  siecle  (Paris,  2003). 
Vattel,  E.,  The  Law  of  Nations  or  the  Principles  of  Natural  Law,  trans,  by  C.G.  Fenwick  (Washington, 

DC,  1916). 

Veinstein,  G.,  "A  propos  des  ehl-i  hiref et  du  devsirme",  in  C.  Heywood  and  C.  Imber  (eds),  Studies 
in  Ottoman  History  in  Honour  of  Professor  V.  L.  Menage  (Istanbul,  1994),  pp.  351-367. 

Veinstein,  G.,  "Le  janissaire  et  l'islamologue:  un  commentaire  du  chapitre  des  Kavdnin-iyeniceri- 
ydn  sur  le  devsirme",  in  M.-A.  Amir  Moezzi,  J.-D.  Dubois,  C.  Jullien,  and  F.  Jullien  (eds),  Pensee 
grecque  etsagesse  d 'Orient:  hommage  a  Michel  Tardieu  (Turnhout,  2009),  pp.  685-696. 

Ven,  Hans  van  de,  "Introduction",  in  Hans  van  de  Ven  (ed.),  Warfare  in  Chinese  History  (Leiden, 
2000),  pp.  1-32. 

Verga,  G.,  Cavalleria  rusticana,  in  G.  Verga  (ed.)  Vita  del  campi  (Milan,  1970). 

Vickers,  Daniel,  Farmers  and  Fishermen:  Two  Centuries  of  Work  in  Essex  County,  Massachusetts, 

7630-7850  (Chapel  Hill,  NC,  1994). 
Vidalenc,  Jean,  "Les  engagements  volontaires  dans  l'armee  de  la  Restauration,  contractus  dans 

le  Calvados",  Annates  de Normandie  (1959),  pp.  109-116. 
Vidalenc,  Jean,  "Engages  etconscrits  sous  la  Restauration  1814-1830",  in Recrutement,  mentalites, 

societes,Actes  du  Colloque  international d'histoire  militaire,  Montpellier,  78-22  septembre  7974 

(Montpellier,  1975),  pp.235-250. 
Villari,  P.,  "Di  chi  e  la  colpa?  O  sia,  la  pace  e  la  guerra",  in  P.  Villari  (ed.),  Saggi  di  storia,  critica  e 

politica  (Florence,  1868),  pp.  385-422. 
Villars,  Marechal  de  (Claude  Louis  Hector),  Memoires  du  Marechal  de  Villars  (Societe  de  l'histoire 

de  France),  6  vols  (Paris,  1888-1904). 
Vlachopoulou,  Anna,  "Like  the  Mafia?  The  Ottoman  Military  Presence  in  the  Morea  in  the 

Eighteenth  Century",  in  Antonis  Anastasopoulos  and  Elias  Kolovos  (eds),  Ottoman  Rule  and 

the  Balkans,  7760-7850:  Conflict,  Transformation,  Adaptation  (Rethymno,  2007),  pp.  123-135. 
Vryonis,  S.  Jr,  "Isidore  Glabas  and  the  Turkish  Devshirme",  Speculum,  31  (1956),  pp.  433-443. 

Waldron,  Arthur,  The  Great  Wall  of  China  (Cambridge,  1990). 

Walls,  A.F.,  "Carrying  the  White  Man's  Burden:  Some  British  Views  of  National  Vocation  in  the 
Imperial  Era",  in  WR.  Hutchison  and  H.  Lehmann  (eds),  Many  Are  Chosen:  Divine  Election 
and  Western  Nationalism  (Minneapolis,  1994),  pp.  29-50. 

Walzer,  Michael,  Obligations:  Essays  on  Disobedience,  War,  and  Citizenship  (Cambridge,  MA, 

1979)  - 

Wang  Yuquan,  Mingdai  dejuntian  (Beijing,  1965). 

Wang  Yuquan,  "Mingdai  xungui  dizhu  de  dianhu",  in  Wang  Yuquan,  Laiwuji  (Beijing,  1983), 
pp.  242-283. 

Wang  Yuquan,  "Some  Salient  Features  of  the  Ming  Labor  Service  System",  Ming  Studies,  21 
(Spring  1986),  pp.  1-44. 

Ward,  P.,  Red  Flag  and  Union  fack:  Englishness,  Patriotism  and  the  British  Left,  7SS7-7924  (Wood- 
bridge,  2003). 

Warren,  C,  "Some  Lessons  from  the  South  African  War",  National  Review,  38  (1901/1902),  pp.  181- 
196. 

Warwick,  P.,  andS.B.  Spies  (eds),  The  South  African  War:  The  Anglo-Boer  War  7S99-7902  (Harlow, 

1980)  . 


682 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Washbrook,  David,  "Orients  and  Occidents:  Colonial  Discourse  Theory  and  the  Historiography 
of  the  British  Empire",  in  Robin  Winks  (ed.),  The  Oxford  History  of  the  British  Empire,  vol.  V, 
Historiography  (Oxford,  1999),  pp.  596-611. 

Way,  Peter,  "Klassenkrieg:  die  urspriingliche  Akkumulation,  die  militarische  Revolution  und 
der  britische  Kriegsarbeiter",  in  Marcel  van  der  Linden  and  Karl  Heinz  Roth  (eds),  Uber 
Marx  hinaus:  Arbeitsgeschichte  und  Arbeitsbegriff  in  der  Konfrontation  mit  den  globalen 
Arbeitsverhdltnissen  des  27.  fahrhunderts  (Hamburg,  2009),  pp.  85-114. 

Way,  Peter,  "Rebellion  of  the  Regulars:  Working  Soldiers  and  the  Mutiny  of  1763-1764",  William 
&  Mary  Quarterly,  3rd  ser.,  57, 4  (Oct.  2000),  pp.  768-771. 

Weber,  Eugen,  Peasants  into  Frenchmen:  The  Modernization  of  Rural  France,  1870-1914  (Stanford, 
1976). 

Wedgwood,  C.V.,  The  Thirty  Years  War  (London,  1981). 

Wei  Zhanbin,  "Mingdai  Menggu  zhubu  dui  guishun  Hanren  de  renyong jiqi  junshi  yingxiang", 

Qujing  shifan  xueyuan  xuebao,  27,  2  (2008),  pp.  68-72. 
Weiss,  Linda,  "Infrastructural  Power,  Economic  Transformation,  and  Globalization",  in  John 

A.  Hall  and  Ralph  Schroeder  (eds),  An  Anatomy  of  Power:  The  Social  Theory  of  Michael  Mann 

(Cambridge,  2006),  pp.  167-186. 
Weissman,  N.,  Les janissaires:  etude  de  Torganisation  mititaire  des  Ottomans  (Paris,  1964). 
Wellmann,  Janina,  "Hand  und  Leib,  Arbeiten  und  Uben.  Instruktionsgraphiken  der  Bewegung  im 

17.  und  18.  Jahrhundert",  in  Rebekka  von  Mallinckrodt  (ed.),  Bewegtes  Leben.  Kbrpertechniken 

in  derFruhen  Neuzeit  (Wolfenbiittel,  2008),  pp.  15-38,  249-259. 
Wells,  H.G.,  War  in  the  Air  (London,  1908). 

Welten,  J.,  In  dienstvoor Napoleons Europese  droom.  De  verstoring  van  de plattelandssamenleving 

in  Weerf  (Leuven,  2007). 
Whatley,  Christopher  A.,  "The  Experience  of  Work",  inT.M.  Devine  and  Rosalind  Mitchison  (eds), 

People  and  Society  in  Scotland,  vol.  1, 1760-1830  (Edinburgh,  1988),  pp.  227-251. 
Wickremesekera,  Channa,  "Best  Black  Troops  in  the  World":  British  Perceptions  and  the  Making 

of  the  Sepoy  1746-1805  (Delhi,  2002). 
Wickremesekera,  Channa,  European  Success  and  Indian  Failure  in  the  SEC:  A  Military  Analysis 

(Victoria,  Aus.,  1998). 

Wilkins,  Charles,  Forging  Urban  Solidarities:  Ottoman  Aleppo  1640-1700  (Leiden,  2010). 
Wilkinson,  G.R.,  Depictions  and  Images  of War  in  Edwardian  Newspapers,  i8gg-igi4  (Aldershot, 
2003). 

Wilkinson,  S.,  The  Brain  of  an  Army:  A  Popular  Account  of the  German  General  Staff '(London,  1909). 
Wilkinson,  S.,  Britain  at  Bay  (London,  1909). 

Wilkinson,  S.,  The  Great  Alternative.  A  Plea  for  a  National  Policy  (1894,  new  edn.  London,  1909). 
Wilkinson,  S.,  "Preparation  for  War",  National  Review  39  (1902),  pp.  197-208. 
Wilkinson,  S.,  War  and  Policy  (London,  1909). 

Williams,  Marshall  B.,  Military  and  Industrial  War  and  the  Science  of Organisation  (London,  1912). 
Willis,  John  M.,  "Making  Yemen  Indian:  Rewriting  the  Boundaries  of  Imperial  Arabia",  Interna- 
tional fournal  of  Middle  East  Studies,  41  (2009),  pp.  23-38. 
Willson,  Beckles,  The  life  and  letters  off ames  Wolfe  (London,  1909). 

Wilson,  H.W,  "The  Anti-National  Party  in  England",  National  Review  37  (1901),  pp.  294-305. 

Wilson,  H.W,  "Democracy  and  the  War",  National  Review  34  (1899),  pp.  506-514. 

Wilson,  Kathleen,  "Empire  ofVirtue:  The  Imperial  Project  and  Hanoverian  Culture  c.1720-1785", 

in  Lawrence  Stone  (ed.),  An  Imperial  State  at  War:  Britain  from  i68g  to  1815  (London,  1994), 

pp.  128-164. 

Wilson,  Peter  H.,  German  Armies:  War  and  German  Politics  1648-1806  (London,  1998). 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


683 


Wilson,  Peter  H.,  "The  German  'Soldier-Trade'  of  the  Seventeenth  and  Eighteenth  Centuries:  A 

Reassessment",  International  History  Review,  18  (1996),  pp.  757-792. 
Wilson,  Peter  H.,  "German  Women  and  War,  1500-1800",  War  in  History,  3  (1996),  pp.  127-160. 
Wilson,  Peter  H.,  "The  Politics  of  Military  Recruitment  in  Eighteenth-Century  Germany",  English 

Historical  Review  107  (2002),  pp.  536-568. 
Wilson,  Peter  H.,  "Social  Militarization  in  Eighteenth-Century  Germany",  German  History,  18, 

1  (2000),  pp.  1-39. 

Wilson,  Peter  H.,  War,  State  and  Society  in  Wiirttemberg,  7677-7793  (Cambridge,  1995). 

Wilson,  Peter  H.,  "Warfare  in  the  Old  Regime,  1648-1789",  in  J.  Black  (ed.),  European  Warfare, 

1453-1815  (Basingstoke,  1999),  pp.  69-95. 
Wink,  Andre,  Al-Hind:  The  Making  of  the  Indo-Islamic  World,  vol.  II,  The  Slave  Kings  and  the 

Islamic  Conquest,  nth-i^th  Centuries  (1997,  reprint,  Delhi,  2001). 
Winter,  Martin,  "Kontinuitat  oder  Neuanfang?  Die  Umsetzung  der  ,allgemeinen  Wehrpflicht' 

zwischen  Reform  und  Restauration",  in  Matthias  Tullner  and  Sascha  Mobius  (eds),  7806: 

fena,  Auerstadt  und  die  Kapitulation  von  Magdeburg,  Schande  oder  Chance?  (Halle,  2007), 

pp.  92-109. 

Winter,  Martin,  Untertanengeist  durch  Militarpflicht?  Das  preufiische  Kantonsystem  in  branden- 

burgischen  Stadten  im  18.  fahrhundert  (Bielefeld,  2005). 
Winter,  Stefan,  "The  Province  of  Raqqa  under  Ottoman  Rule,  1535-1800:  A  Preliminary  Study", 

Journal  of  Near  Eastern  Studies,  68  (2009),  pp.  253-267. 
Wirtschafter,  Elise  Kimerling,  From  Serf  to  Russian  Soldier  (Princeton,  1990). 
Wirtschafter,  Elise  Kimerling,  "Legal  Identity  and  the  Possession  of  Serfs  in  Imperial  Russia", 

Journal  of  Modern  History  -jo  (1998),  pp.  561-587. 
Wirtschafter,  Elise  Kimerling,  Russia's  Age  of  Serfdom  7649-7867  (Maiden,  MA,  2008). 
[Wirtschafter],  Elise  Kimerling,  "Soldiers'  Children,  1719-1856:  A  Study  of  Social  Engineering  in 

Imperial  Russia",  Forschungen  zur  osteuropdischen  Geschichte,  30  (1982),  pp.  61-136. 
Wirtschafter,  Elise  Kimerling,  Structures  of  Society:  Imperial  Russia's  "People  of  Various  Ranks" 

(DeKalb,  IL,  1994). 

Wise,  Nathan,  '"In  Military  Parlance,  I  Suppose  We  Were  Mutineers':  Industrial  Relations  in 
the  Australian  Imperial  Force  during  World  War  I",  labour  History,  101  (2011),  pp.  161-176. 

Wise,  Nathan,  "The  Lost  Labour  Force:  Working-Class  Approaches  to  Military  Service  during 
the  Great  War",  labour  History,  93  (2007),  pp.  161-176. 

Wittek,  P.,  "Devshirme  and  Shari'a",  BSOAS,  17  (1955),  p.  271-278. 

Wittman,  William,  Travels  in  Turkey,  Asia  Minor,  Syria  and  Across  the  Desert  into  Egypt  During  the 

years  ijgg,  i8ooandi8oi,  in  Company  with  The  Turkish  Army,  and  the  British  Military  Mission 

(London,  1803,  New  York,  1971). 
Wohlfeil,  R.,  "Der  Volkskrieg  im  Zeitalter  Napoleons",  in  H.-O.  Sieburg  (ed.),  Napoleon  undEuropa 

(Cologne,  1971),  pp.  318-332- 
Wolfrum,  E.,  Krieg  und  Frieden  in  der  Neuzeit.  Vom  Westfalischen  Frieden  bis  zum  Zweiten 

Weltkrieg  (Darmstadt,  2003). 
Woloch,  Isser,  "Napoleonic  Conscription:  State  Power  and  Civil  Society",  Past  &  Present,  111 

(1986),  pp.  110-122. 

Woloch,  Isser,  The  New  Regime:  Transformation  of  the  French  Civic  Order,  ij8g-i820s  (New  York, 
1995)- 

Wood.J.B.,  The  King's  Army :  Warfare,  Soldiers,  and  Society  during  the  Wars  of  Religion  in  France, 

7562-7576  (Cambridge,  1996). 
Woodside,  Alexander,  "The  Ch'ien-lung  Reign",  in  The  Cambridge  History  of  China,  vol.  IX,  The 

Ch'ing  Empire  to  1800,  Willard J.  Peterson  (ed.)  (Cambridge,  2002),  pp.  230-309. 
Wormald,  J.,  lords  and  Men  in  Scotland:  Bonds  of Manrent  1442-1603  (Edinburgh,  1985). 


684 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Worthington,  David  (ed.),  British  and  Irish  Emigrants  and  Exiles  in  Europe  1603-1688  (Leiden,  2010). 
Wrigley,  E.A.,  "Society  and  the  Economy  in  the  Eighteenth  Century",  in  Lawrence  Stone  (ed.), 

An  Imperial  State  at  War:  Britain  from  i68g  to  1815  (London,  1994),  pp.  72-95. 
Wu  Han,  "Mingdai  de  jun  bing",  Zhongguo  shehuijingjishijikan,  2,  2  (1937),  pp.  147-200. 
Wu  Yue  (Go  Yaku),  Min  Shin jidai  noyoeki  seido  to  chiho  gyosei  (Osaka,  2000). 
Wiippermann,  W.E.A.,  De  vorming  van  het  Nederlandsche  leger  na  de  omwenteling  van  1813  en 

het  aandeet  van  dat  leger  aan  de  veldtocht  van  1813  (Breda,  1900). 
Wiirdinger,  Joseph,  "Die  bayerischen  Landfahnen  vomjahre  1651-1705",  Verhandlungen  des 

historischen  Vereinsfur  Niederbayern,  9  (1863),  pp.  122-138. 
Wymans,  G.,  "Les  mutineries  militaires  de  1596  a  1606",  Standen  en  landen,  39  (1966),  pp.  105-121. 

Xiao  Xu,  "Mingdai  jiangshuai  jiading  de  xingshuai  ji  qi  yingxiang",  Nankai  shixue,  1  (1984), 
pp.  102-122. 

Xing  Xinbao, "  'Lii/luying'  de  duyin",  in  Zhongguo  lishi jiaoxue yanjiu,  1-2  (2007). 

Yadava,  B.N.S.,  "Chivalry  and  Warfare",  in  Jos  J. L.  Gommans  and  Dirk  H.A.  Kolff  (eds),  Warfare 

and  Weaponry  in  South  Asia:  1000-1800  (Delhi,  2001),  pp.  66-98. 
Yalman,  Ahmed  Emin,  Turkey  in  the  World  War  (New  Haven,  CT,  1930). 

Yang,  Anand  A.,The  limited  Raj:  Agrarian  Relations  in  Colonial  India,  Saran  District,  1793-1920 
(Berkeley,  CA,  1989). 

Yate,  A.C.,  "The  Spirit  of  the  Nation  in  War",  United  Service  Magazine,  142  (1900),  pp.  14-21. 
Yildiz,  Giiltekin,  NeferinAdi  YohZorunluAskerlige  Gecis  Surecinde  Osmanli  Devleti'nde  Siyaset, 

Orduve  Toplum  (1826-1839)  (Istanbul,  2009). 
Youngson,  A.}.,  After  the  Forty-Five:  The  Economic  Impact  on  the  Scottish  Highlands  (Edinburgh, 

1973)- 

Yu  Zhijia,  Mingdai junhu  shixizhidu  (Taibei,  1987). 
Yu  Zhijia,  Weisuo,  junhu,  yu junyi  (Beijing,  2010). 

Zaidi,  S.  Inayat  Ali,  "Akbar  and  the  Rajput  Principalities:  Integration  into  Empire",  in  Irfan  Habib 

(ed.),  Akbar  and  His  India  (1997,  reprint,  Delhi,  2002),  pp.  15-24. 
Zaidi,  S.  Inayat  Ali,  "Ordinary  Kachawaha  Troopers  serving  the  Mughal  Empire:  Composition  and 

Structure  of  the  Contingents  of  the  Kachawaha  Nobles",  Studies  in  History,  2  (1980),  pp.  57-68. 
Zaidi,  S.  Inayat  Ali,  "Rozindar  Troopers  under  Sawai  Jai  Singh  of  Jaipur  (AD  1700-1743)",  Indian 

Historical  Review,  10  (1983-84),  pp.  45-65. 
Zannoni,  M.,  and  M.  Fiorentino,  leReali  Truppe  Parmensi  (1848-1859)  (Parma,  1984). 
Zhangjinkui,  Mingdai  weisuo  junhu  yanjiu  (Beijing,  2007). 

Zhao  Zhongnan,  "Lun  Mingdai  jundui  zhong  jiading  de  tedianyu  diwei",  Shehui  kexuejikan,  3 
(1988),  pp.  144-149- 

Zhao  Zhongnan,  "Lun  Mingdai  junshi  jiading  zhidu  xingcheng  de  shehui  jingji  tiaojian  jiqi 

fazhan",  Shehui  kexue jikan,  73  (1991),  pp.  86-90. 
Zhu  Yuanzhang,  "The  Placards  of  the  People's  Instructions",  trans,  by  Edward  Farmer,  in  Zhu 

Yuanzhang,  Zhu  Yuanzhang  and  Early  Ming  legislation  (Leiden,  1995),  pp.  195-209. 
Ziegler,  Norman  P.,  "Evolution  of  the  Rathor  State  of  Marvar:  Horses,  Structural  Change  and 

Warfare",  in  Karine  Schomer,  Joan  L.  Erdman,  Deryck  0.  Lodrick  and  Lloyd  I.  Rudolph 

(eds),  The  Idea  of  Rajasthan,  Explorations  in  Regional  Identity,  vol.  2,  Institutions  (Delhi, 

1994),  PP- 192-216. 

Ziegler,  Norman  P.,  "Marvari  Historical  Chronicles:  Sources  for  the  Social  and  Cultural  History 
of  Rajasthan",  Indian  Economic  and  Social  History  Review,  13  (1976),  pp.  127-153. 


COLLECTIVE  BIBLIOGRAPHY 


685 


Ziircher,  Erik-Jan,  "Between  Death  and  Desertion:  The  Experience  of  the  Ottoman  Soldier  in 

World  War  I",  Turcica,  28  (1996),  pp.  235-258. 
Ziircher,  Erik-Jan,  "Fighting  for  a  Living:  Origins,  Practices  and  Consequences  of  Different  Forms 

of  Military  Employment  in  Europe,  the  Middle  East  and  Asia  (1500-2000)",  revised  position 

paper  for  the  Collaboratory  Fighting  for  a  Living,  https://projects.iisg.nl/web/fighting-for- 

a-living/results. 

Ziircher,  Erik-Jan,  "Hizmet  Etmey  i  Baska  Bicimlerle  Reddetmek:  Osmanh  Imparatorlugunun  Son 

Donemlerinde  Asker  Kacakligi",  in  Ozgiir  Heval  Cinar  and  Coskun  Usterci  (eds),  Carklardaki 

Kum:  Vicdani Red  (Istanbul,  2008),  pp.  59-68. 
Ziircher,  Erik-Jan,  "Little  Mehmet  in  the  Desert:  The  Ottoman  Soldier's  Experience",  in  Hugh 

Cecil  and  Peter  Liddle  (eds),  Facing  Armageddon:  The  First  World  War  Experienced  (London, 

1988),  pp.  230-241. 

Ziircher,  Erik-Jan,  "The  Nation  and  Its  Deserters:  Conscription  in  Mehmed  Ali's  Egypt",  in  Erik-Jan 

Ziircher  (ed.),  Arming  the  State:  Military  Conscription  in  the  Middle  East  and  Central  Asia, 

1775-1925  (London  [etc.],  1999),  pp.  59-77. 
Ziircher,  Erik-Jan,  "The  Ottoman  Conscription  System  in  Theory  and  Practice,  1844-1918", 

International  Review  of  Social  History,  43,  3  (1998),  pp.  437-449;  also  in  Erik-Jan  Ziircher 

(ed.),  Arming  the  State:  Military  Conscription  in  the  Middle  East  and  Central  Asia,  1775-1925 

(London  [etc.],  1999),  pp.  79"94- 
Ziircher,  Erik-Jan,  "Ottoman  Labour  Battalions  in  World  War  I",  in  Hans-Lukas  Kieser  and 

DominikJ.  Schaller  (eds),  The  Armenian  Genocide  and  the  Shoah  (Zurich,  2002),  pp.  187-196. 
Ziircher,  Erik-Jan,  "Refusing  to  Serve  by  Other  Means:  Desertion  in  the  Late  Ottoman  Empire", 

in  0.  H.  Cinar  and  Coskun  Usterci  (eds),  Conscientious  Objection:  Resisting  Militarized  Society 

(London,  2009),  pp.  45-52. 
Zurndorfer,  Harriet,  "What  Is  the  Meaning  of 'War'  in  an  Age  of  Cultural  Efflorescence?  Another 

Look  at  the  Role  of  War  in  Song  Dynasty  China  (960-1279)",  in  Marco  Formisano  and  Hartmut 

Bohme  (eds),  War  in  Words  (Berlin,  New  York,  2010),  pp.  89-112. 
Zwitzer,  H.L.,  "De  militie  van  de  staat".  Het  leger  van  de  Republiek  der  Verenigde  Nederlanden 

(Amsterdam,  1991). 


Notes  on  contributors 


Dr  Virginia  H.  Aksan  is  Professor  at  the  Department  of  History,  McMaster 
University,  Canada. 

Dr  Herman  Amersfoort  is  Professor  of  Military  History  at  the  Netherlands 
Defence  Academy  and  at  the  University  of  Amsterdam,  the  Netherlands. 

Dr  Beth  Bailey  is  Professor  of  History  at  Temple  University,  Philadelphia, 
PA,USA. 

Dr  Mehmet  Besikci  is  Lecturer  in  Modern  Turkish  History,  Yildiz  Technical 
University,  Istanbul,  Turkey. 

Dr  Thomas  Hippler  is  Senior  Lecturer  at  Sciences  Po,  Lyon. 

Dr  Robert  Johnson  is  Director  of  the  Oxford  Changing  Character  of  War 
Programme,  Oxford  University,  UK. 

S.  Yelda  Kaya  is  Research  Assistant  at  the  Middle  East  Technical  University, 
Ankara,  Turkey. 

Dr  Elise  Kimerling  Wirtschafter  is  Professor  of  History,  California  State 
Polytechnic  University,  Pomona,  CA,  USA. 

Dr  Dirk  Kolff  is  Emeritus  Professor  of  Modern  South  Asian  History,  and  was 
Director  of  the  Leiden  Research  School  of  Asian,  African  and  Amerindian 
Studies,  1992-1997,  Leiden  University,  the  Netherlands. 

Dr  Jorn  Leonhard  is  Full  Professor  in  Modern  European  History  at  the 
University  of  Freiburg,  Germany. 

James  Miller  is  independent  researcher  and  researcher  in  Scotland. 

Dr  Christine  Moll-Murata  is  Senior  Lecturer  for  Chinese  History  and 
Philosphy  at  the  Ruhr-Universitat  Bochum,  Germany. 

Dr  David  Robinson  is  Robert  H.N.  Ho  Professor  in  Asian  Studies  and  History 
at  Colgate  University,  Hamilton,  NY,  USA. 


688 


NOTES  ON  CONTRIBUTORS 


Dr  Marco  Rovinello  is  Research  Fellow  at  the  Dapretment  of  Social  Sciences 
of  the  University  of  Naples  "Federico  II",  Italy. 

Dr  Kaushik  Roy  is  Associate  Professor,  at  the  Department  of  History,  Ja- 
davpur  University,  Kolkata,  India  and  Senior  Researcher  at  Peace  Research 
Institute  Oslo  (PRIO),  Norway. 

Dr  Michael  Sikora  is  Associate  Professor  of  History,  Westfalische  Wilhelms- 
Universitat,  Miinster,  Germany. 

Dr  Frank  Tallett  is  Fellow  in  History  at  the  University  of  Reading,  UK. 

Dr  Ulrich  Theobald  is  Senior  Lecturer  for  Chinese  languages  and  history  at 
the  Eberhard-Karls  Universitat  Tubingen,  Germany. 

Dr  Gilles  Veinstein  (1945-2013)  was  Professor  at  the  Ecole  des  hautes  etudes 
en  sciences  sociales,  Paris,  and  Professor  at  the  College  de  France. 

Dr  Peter  Way  is  Professor  of  History,  University  of  Windsor,  Canada. 

Dr  Erik-Jan  Zurcher  is  Professor  of  Turkish  languages  and  cultures  at  Leiden 
University,  the  Netherlands. 


Fighting  for  a  Living  investigates  the  circumstances 
that  have  produced  starkly  different  systems  of 
recruiting  and  employing  soldiers  in  different 
parts  of  the  globe.over  the  last  ^oo  years.  Offering 
a  wide  range  of  case  studies  taken  from  Europe, 
America,  the  Middle  East  and  Asia,  this  volume 

is  not  military  history  in  the  traditional  sense, 
but  looks  at  military  service  and  warfare  as  forms 
of 'labour,  and  at  soldiers  as  workers.  Military 
employment  offers  excellent  opportunities  for 
international  comparison:  armies  as  a  form  of 
organized  violence  are  ubiquitous,  and  soldiers,  in 
one  form  or  another,  are  always  part  of  the  picture, 
in  any  period  and  in  every  region.  Fighting  for  a 
Living  is  the  first  study  to  undertake  a  systematic 
comparative  analysis  of  military  labour.  It  therefore 
will  be  of  interest  to  both  labour  historians  and 
military  historians,  as  .well  as  to  sociologists, 
political  scientists,  and  other  social  scientists. 


Erik-Jan  Ziircher  is  professor  of  Turkish 
Studies  at  Leiden  University.  In  2008  he  was 
elected  a  member  of  the  Royal  Netherlands 
Academy  of  Arts  and  Sciences, 


isbn  978  90  8964  452  7 

amsterdam  university  press 
www.aup.nl